The Richter Scale
by Lady Chal
Summary: Webb/Mac. Clayton Webb spends Thanksgiving in California with his daughter and discovers something about his ex-wife that will shake the foundation of his world. Set 6 years after the events in "Memorial Day," before "Do Not Look for me in Death."
1. Chapter 1: Gray

**The Richter Scale**

**By Lady Chal**

**Summary: **Set 6 years after the events in my previous story "Memorial Day." While spending Thanksgiving with his daughter in California, Clayton Webb discovers something about his ex-wife that will shake the foundation of his world.

**AN:** To completely understand this universe, you may want to visit my page and read all my JAG fic in the following order: "Speak to Me in the Middle of the Night," "Lion Among the Lambs," "Memorial Day," this story, and then finally "Do Not Look for Me in Death." I make no apologies, this is totally Webb/Mac! You have been warned...

"_Is this Major a looker?"_

"_Seven-point-six."_

"—_Wait, wait. –You break it down into tenths?!"_

"_I use the Richter scale."_

_--We the People_

**Part I: Gray**

26 November 2027

UCSF MEDICAL CENTER

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

The rain pounded steadily against the glass wall of the waiting room. Large, fat drops flattened out against the mirrored surface before joining the streaming rivulets that trailed down to the wet pavement far below. Here and there, bright umbrellas dotted the sidewalks like waves of soggy, dancing blossoms. Save for that, the world outside the window was lost in a wash of gray. The Bay Bridge was almost completely obscured save for the small pinpoints of flashing red light that occasionally pierced the rain and mist.

A low rumble of thunder echoed from sea and rolled across the city, vibrating the small drops of water that beaded on the glass. A moment later a flash of lightning slashed across the sky and illuminated the face of the man who stood at the window, staring grimly at the gray world beyond. It was a scene that was both foreign and familiar to him. He'd never been to San Francisco. He'd been to hundreds of cities in dozens of countries all over the globe, but somehow he'd managed to completely miss this one. Still, damp and dismal as it was, it didn't seem much different from London or Paris, Budapest or Tokyo. The buildings and faces might change, he thought, but the dismal gray of a rainstorm always remained the same.

Clayton Webb was something of an authority on gray. It had tinted his world for longer than he could remember. Some people saw their lives in black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. A glorious and lucky few lived their lives in Technicolor, but those were mostly artists and dreamers. Life had never been black and white for Webb, and color, for the most part, was just a dream. There were no easy choices. There had been no such thing as a clean dividing line between right and wrong. There had only been situations, and parameters from which actions must be chosen and consequences lived with. For a life lived in the shadows, there was no such thing as black and white. There were only subtle variations of gray.

Another bolt of lightning flashed outside the window, enhancing the shadows of the room and making him suddenly aware of his own reflection, cast in the darkened glass by the dim light of the small lamp behind him. It occurred to him that he looked almost as drab as the world outside the window. From the gray of his hair to the charcoal of his suit and the silver headed cane he leaned upon, he was practically colorless.

The next flash of lightning allowed him a better look, and he ran his fingers down his chest, touching the raw silk of his tie and nervously smoothing it into place. He smiled faintly at the deep red sheen of the fabric. Well, perhaps he wasn't completely colorless. There was this damned tie that Penny had insisted he wear. He didn't know what the big deal was; the Navy one with the silver stripe would have done just as well. Penny, however, had not seen it that way. She had pulled this one out of a box in her closet and refused to let him leave her apartment until he had taken off the other and donned this one instead. He had known better than to argue. She was channeling her mother in that particular moment, and it really wouldn't matter what he said. In the end, he was going to lose.

Which was how he'd ended up here, he thought glumly, a gray man in a gray world, staring down at the small scrap of color in his hand as he waited for the color that remained in his life to return to him.

"Daddy?"

He turned sharply at the sound of his daughter's voice, and was momentarily jolted at the sight of her. Yes, Penny was his color now. Of that, there could be no doubt. Her gleaming dark hair shown with rich mahogany highlights, and her hazel eyes sparkled with glints of green and gold that complimented bright emerald silk of her blouse. God, he thought, she was Sarah all over again. Ok, maybe not quite yet, but she would be. Six-point-two, he decided as his gaze swept over her with a discerning eye, but she was destined to go higher. Like her mother, she'd only get better with age. As it was, he already had Phillips beating the boys off with a stick whenever she came home to visit.

He must have been studying her just a bit too intently, because she reached out and laid a careful hand upon his arm.

"You looked pretty deep for moment there, Dad," she said softly. "What were you thinking about?"

"The Richter scale," he muttered.

Penny shot him an odd look. "Care to translate that?"

"Maybe …if you'd been a boy" he said.

"Huh," Penny snorted, "Story of my life."

Clay jerked his head towards the hall from which she'd entered.

"What did the Doctor say?"

Penny shrugged. It was a small gesture that somehow spoke volumes and made her seem older than her twenty years. "She's resting right now. They gave her some painkillers and ran some x-rays. They don't think she did any serious damage when she fell."

"And do they know why she fell?" he demanded.

Penny drew in a small breath, and said. "She had a dizzy spell."

Clay said nothing. He didn't have to. Penny was lying –or at least not telling all of the truth-- and they both knew it. She'd learned long ago to look a person straight in the eye when shading a truth, but she'd never quite managed to overcome the small inhalation that was her only tell. So he simply narrowed his gaze upon her, and waited.

One heartbeat passed between them, and then another before Penny finally wilted with a heavy sigh. "She was dizzy because she was still weak from the treatments."

"What treatments?" Clay demanded. Penny flinched at the sharpness in his tone, but he refused to relent, pinning her with the same dark expression that had wilted lower level State Department bureaucrats and any military personnel below the rank of Lieutenant. She lasted for all of about thirty-five seconds.

"Chemo," she mumbled, not quite meeting his eye.

Clay cocked his head, not quite sure that he had heard correctly. "Excuse me?" His voice sounded strangled, even to his own ears, and he was dimly aware of the death grip he held upon the cane.

Penny stepped forward and took his arm again, steadying him as the impact of her words rocked through him. "She's taking chemotherapy, Dad. She has cancer."

Clay focused upon steadying his breathing. He willed his legs to remain upright. He forced his mouth to stay closed even as the small shadowy details began to merge and coalesce in the back of his mind. It all made sense now, if he thought about it: Spring break spent with friends in Seattle rather than coming home to DC… Summer classes at UCLA that he had yet to see a tuition bill for... and most of all, the nagging feeling that something was going on in his daughter's life which she didn't feel she could share with him. –And all this time he'd been foolish enough to think it was just a boy.

He gazed at Penny for a long moment, seeing both the little girl and the woman in her face, seeing both his daughter and a person he wasn't sure he'd ever met.

"How long?" he asked hoarsely.

She gripped his arm even tighter, anxious now to reassure him. "Oh, Dad… it's still early. They think she's got a really good chance of—

"That's not what I'm talking about, Penelope," he said flatly. "You knew. How long have you known?"

Penny bit her lip. "You…um… remember when Mom broke her leg?"

"On your birthday," Clay said. "You said she went roller-blading with you and Katie."

Penny nodded, "Yeah, well, she didn't exactly break it because she was roller blading…. I mean, we _were_ roller-blading and everything, but… it just sort of broke on its own. --I mean one minute we were going along fine and then the next minute mom just fell down and…and…"

Penny floundered for breath and words, as the story, pent up for so long inside her came tumbling out. Clay dropped his cane to grasp her other arm and led her to the couch, no longer quite sure who was supporting who.

"The next thing I knew we were at the hospital and the Doctors were talking about x-rays, and shadows…and tests…and…and…they said she had some kind of bone cancer. I don't even know the name of it. It was growing in her leg and that's what made it weak and break…and…oh, Dad," she wailed, "I'm just so scared I don't know what to do!"

Clay reached for her then, pulling her into his arms like the little girl she once had been. "Hush," he said softly, his breath feathering the hair at her temple. "Hush," he murmured again, rocking her gently in his arms.

When her sobs had subsided, he pushed her back a bit and put a hand to her tearstained cheek. He rubbed away the dampness with his thumb and then framed her face in his hands, forcing her to look at him.

"Why didn't you tell me?" He asked.

Penny sniffed. "I wanted to," she admitted. "so many times, but…I just…"

He plucked the linen handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. "You could have told me, Pen." He said quietly, stroking her hair. "You should have told me. You shouldn't have had to deal with this alone."

Penny wiped her eyes, dabbed at her nose, then began to slowly twist the handkerchief between her fingers. "Mom asked me not to," she admitted quietly. "She doesn't want anyone to know."

Clay sank slowly back against the cushions. "No," he said dimly, "you mean she doesn't want me to know."

"Oh, Daddy! It's not like that."

Clay covered his face with his hands, struggling to compose himself. "Of course it's like that," he said tiredly. "It's been 'like that' for the last three years. Your mother has made it perfectly clear she no longer wants me to be involved in her life."

He dropped his hands and shot his daughter an irritated look. "Apparently she did not get the memo about my intentions to stay completely involved in _your_ life. I can not believe she expected you to deal with this alone!" he snapped, unable to control the fierce anger that only Sarah could stir in him.

"It's ok, Dad," Penny said uneasily, "I wasn't alone, I had Mom, we had each other."

Clay shot her a baleful look. "That's not enough, and you know it. –So does she. You might be her support system, but she can't be yours, not when she's sick." He raked a hand through his hair. "God, I can't believe you didn't tell me!"

He felt Penny's hand close around his own, squeezing tightly. "Dad," Penny said haltingly, "She didn't do it to hurt you. She really didn't….but you know how she is. She's just so…proud and so…"

"Stubborn," Clay said softly.

Penny smiled faintly. "Yeah," she whispered. "I think she's scared, Dad. She just won't admit it, not to me –not even to herself. I think she didn't want me to tell you because she knew you would come charging out here with a battalion of doctors and specialists and money and she just didn't want that."

"Well of course I would have," Clay said irritably. "Christ, Pen! Chemo? What is this, the Dark Ages? You're the heiress to a foundation that invests fifty million dollars a year in cancer research. I think we could have done a little better than that. There's a clinic in Switzerland that's had incredible success. You could have talked her into going there at least."

"Believe me, Dad, I tried." Penny said. "She wouldn't have it. She insisted on doing it all on her own. Chemo is what the government was willing to pay for, so that's what she did."

"She's doing this on her military benefit plan?" Clay was horrified. "What in God's name has she done with her divorce settlement?"

The silence from the other end of the sofa was suddenly deafening. Clay slowly turned the full force of his gaze upon his daughter. Penny had knotted the handkerchief into a hopeless tangle. "She gave it to me," she said quietly.

"What?" he said stupidly. He was starting to feel like the coyote in those old Warner Brothers cartoons, mowed down by a freight train, only to get up and be bowled over again by another one coming from the opposite direction. Clearly there was much that Sarah and Penny had been keeping from him as of late.

"She put it all into a trust for me. I'll get it when I graduate from college. In the mean time, she set up a bank account for me in LA and has some money transferred into it every month. She's been living off of her pension –and her checks from the practice."

It was not unlike the arrangement that he himself had made for Penny. Clay made a mental note to substantially decrease the monthly amounts he was transferring to his daughter's account. It was possible to have too much of a good thing, especially when it came to college students and spending money.

He leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees, staring over his clasped hands to the polished toes of his black wingtips. "So what else have you been keeping from me?" he asked quietly.

More silence.

"Tell me about Spring Break," he said. "Were you up here? Is that why you didn't come home?"

"Dad…."

"I know you weren't in Seattle," he continued. "You told me you going up there with Katie to spend the week at her family's cabin. Funny thing though, when I called your apartment to let you know I was going to be up at Manderley for the rest of the month, I didn't get your answering machine. I got Katie."

"You never said anything," she whispered.

"I was waiting for you to tell me the truth," he said simply. "I still am."

"Dad, I'm so sorry…"

She reached for him again, laying her hand upon his wrist. He recoiled slightly at the contact, balling his fist reflexively at the touch of her fingers upon his skin.

"In spite of what your mother might think, I'm not made of stone, Pen," he said tightly. "It was bad enough when your mother cut me from her life. I don't…." he swallowed hard, "I don't think I can stand it if I lose you, too."

Incredibly, instead of pulling away, her fingers tightened around his wrist, pulling his hands apart. Taking his left hand firmly in hers, Penny laced her fingers tightly through his limp ones and leaned into him, pressing her face into the hollow of his neck and shoulder, just as she'd done as a child.

"Oh, God, Dad," she whispered. "I'm so sorry! I never meant –I didn't know you thought that…" she sighed heavily. "If it's any consolation, Mom thought I was in Seattle, too."

"So where were you?"

"I was in L.A., in the hospital," she said.

He had thought himself beyond surprise at this point; even so, he felt his fingers twitch automatically in hers. She squeezed back in reassurance.

"I was having tests done. I had a bone marrow biopsy, to see if I would be a compatible donor for Mom."

"Are you?"

Penny nodded. "I am, but so far, she won't hear of it. She's convinced the chemo and radiation treatments are going to work. –If they don't, though, a bone marrow transplant is the next step."

Clay scrubbed the hand Penny wasn't holding across his face. "Well, that's something I guess."

"I'm sorry I lied to you, Dad." Penny said quietly, "and I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Mom. I wanted to, but she's…"

"Bull-headed," Clay finished.

"Yeah."

Freeing his hand from hers, Clay wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close. "I'm sorry too, Sweet Pea," he said, brushing a kiss across the top of her head. "I knew something was going on with you, I should have put it together sooner. I should have talked to you until you started talking back. I was just so…"

"Lost," Penny said quietly.

He didn't deny it.  
"You've been lost for a long time, Daddy," Penny observed. "I think we all have, --even Mom, although she pretends she isn't."

He sighed and sank back into the sofa cushions, pulling her with him. "Your mother takes pride almost to the point of insanity. I think she'd rather die than ask for help." He shot a sidewise glance at his daughter. "Sorry," he said, "bad choice of words."

Penny snorted. "Why are you apologizing? It's true. Every time I try to help her she won't let me. I decided not to go back to Virginia for the summer so I could help her through the chemo, but she keeps pushing me back to L.A. every chance she gets. She won't let me get better doctors. She wouldn't let me call you. She won't let anybody do anything."

"I don't know about you," he said slowly, "But I think your mother's had her own way on this thing for long enough."

"Tell me about it," Penny groaned, sinking deeper into the couch cushions.

"So what are we going to do about it?"

She rolled her head towards him, and regarded him warily. "I don't know," she said, "What _are_ we going to do about it?"

Clay thought about this for a moment. "Well," he said at last, "I think the first thing is for you to go back and sit with her until she wakes up. When she does, you explain what happened and tell her that as far as I'm concerned, the jig is up."

"And then?"

"And then," Clay said grimly, "you head for the nearest bolt hole because she and I are about to have a talk."

Penny raised her head from the cushions to look at him. "Really?"

"Really," he said grimly.

"Wow," she said slowly, "You're braver than I thought."

Not really, his inner voice chided. A braver man would have come after her two years ago, instead of signing those damned divorce papers and letting her slip away in the first place. He jerked his head towards the hallway. "Go on," he said quietly. "Be there when she wakes up."

Penny leaned over to kiss his cheek and then slowly extracted herself from the couch. She bent down and retrieved his cane, lying forgotten on the floor, and handed it to him. He gave her hand a final squeeze.

"Come and get me when you're ready," he said.

She nodded silently and left.

Clay turned slightly to watch her go, and was struck again by how different she had become in the few short months since he had last seen her. –Different, and yet the same. She was woman now, but somewhere inside she was still his little girl, and he suspected that where he was concerned, that child would never be very far away.

He sank back into the cushions and closed his eyes. God, how had this happened? They had all been so close, once. They had been the damned Washington gold-standard of happy suburban life. They'd had it all: the perfect marriage, the perfect daughter, the perfect house, even the perfect standard issue dog and cat.

Well, on second thought, maybe the cat hadn't been that perfect. There were those four citations they'd received from Animal control for Tigger doing his business in Mrs. Montgomery's Begonia bed. On the other hand, there'd been a certain poetic justice in it, what with all those damned birds she insisted on feeding that carpet bombed every deck and drive and parked vehicle up and down the block. Maybe that was why Sarah had left him the cat. She could live content in the knowledge that Tigger would continue to crap in old lady Montgomery's prize Begonias, while Clay continued to pay the fines for it.

Not that it mattered, now. Whatever they'd had before was gone. The house in Alexandria was empty, primped and painted with a real-estate sign tastefully displayed in the front yard. He and the cat were at Manderley, Penny was in college at UCLA, discovering her own life, and Sarah and the dog were in San Francisco in a three story Painted Lady she'd bought before the ink on their divorce papers was even dry.

They were all cast asunder now, circling about Penny in an unsteady orbit, uncertain of themselves and each other, with none of them knowing how to reconnect. Penny was right: They were lost, had been lost for the last three years. No, he decided silently. They'd been lost for far longer than that. More like six, if he wanted to be perfectly honest with himself. That wasn't the worst part, though. The worst part was the knowledge that they had come to this because of him. Poetic justice, he thought grimly. Angry and hurt and betrayed as he might feel right now, he could not judge them too harshly for the secrets they had kept from him. It was merely the reflection of his own sins coming home to roost.


	2. Chapter 2: Reflections

Part II: Reflections

**Part II: Reflections**

He'd always heard that a visit to San Francisco was not complete without watching the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge. Frankly, the one he had witnessed was not much to write home about. The only way he had been able to judge the slow transition from afternoon to evening was by the gradual darkening of the leaden sky and the swell and fade of the rush hour traffic. He hadn't even been able to see the bridge.

It was full dark now. The lamp on the small end table at his elbow was the only light at this end of the waiting room. It's soft yellow glow shown like a beacon in the dark reflection of the glass wall, doubling his present reality into a darker parallel universe.

Actually, he wasn't entirely certain this _was_ reality. It still held a surreal quality that tempted him to wonder which side of the mirror he was really on. Part of his mind was still in denial. He really shouldn't be here, in this hospital waiting room in San Francisco. He was supposed to be in L.A. tonight, sitting with Penny in a box seat at the symphony, listening to Caroline sing the aria from "Gianni Schicchi." He was supposed to be watching his younger sister's final performance with the Los Angeles Symphony, not sitting alone on a couch contemplating the fact that the only woman he'd ever really loved might very well die.

But Fate, it seemed, had ways of making a short walk from breakfast with his daughter in Santa Monica to supper from a hospital vending machine in San Francisco. They had spent their first morning together in months with coffee and bagels and a leisurely walk along the pier, followed it up with some sightseeing and had returned to Penny's apartment shortly after lunch. The intercom had chimed softly as they had stepped through the front door, informing Penny that she had new messages.

"Play," she had commanded, kicking her flip-flops into the closet behind the front door and padding into the living room barefoot. A smooth, electronic version of a woman's voice echoed through the apartment, emanating from both the stereo system in the living room and small speakers in the kitchen, bath and hallway as the date and time of the first message was announced.

"Miss Webb, this is Doctor Hammond at UCSF Medical Center. I wanted to let you know that we admitted your mother this morning. I don't want you to worry about anything, she's doing fine now, but we're going to keep her overnight and run a few more tests. If you have any questions, please call me at…"

They'd called, all right, but not the doctor. He'd had his jet refueled and waiting for them with a flight plan filed for San Francisco in the time it had taken them to drive to the airport. They'd touched down less than an hour later, where he'd arranged for a car to take them to the hospital. He'd been standing here in this damned waiting room ever since, drinking coffee, not reading the magazines and ignoring the news anchors that muttered softly from flat panel screens discreetly placed around the room.

Clay used his cane to tap one such panel, embedded in the center of the coffee table before him, and turned off the ZNN webcast. He paid little attention to world events these days. In fact, since the signing of the Korean reunification treaty and his retirement as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency five years ago, he didn't much give a damn about what the world did. He'd paid his dues. He'd done his part. He'd built his legacy and walked away. His only regret was that he hadn't done it sooner.

Dropping his cane back across his knees, Clay stared into the dark mirror of the glass wall beyond. He was suddenly struck by how old he looked. It really didn't come as a surprise, but rather as an emphasis. He knew he was old. He was as thin at sixty-four as he had been at twenty, but he suddenly realized there was a frailty to his physique now, rather than the lean, lithe grace which he had borne in his youth.

In truth, there was little about him that was graceful these days. The heart attack had taken the wind out of his sails, but it was the stroke that followed it which had left him in tatters. Oh, time and money and years of physical therapy had managed to rebuild him somewhat, but he'd always be left with this damned cane, the clumsy left hand and the perpetual frown at the corner of his mouth. He could still swim and ride a horse if he was careful, but he'd had to give up the fencing, and he hadn't sat down at piano since Penny had coaxed him into it last Christmas. They'd made a halting duet at first, but eventually managed a few carols. He played the melody. She played the bass. He smiled faintly at the memory. It was probably a good thing Sarah hadn't been there to hear it. They had sounded atrocious. His smile abruptly faded at the stray thought of his ex-wife. Two years. Two damned years, and he still caught himself wondering what she would think of this or that.

He constantly had to remind himself that she wouldn't think anything. She really didn't care. No, that wasn't exactly true. She did care tangentially, but only as it related to Penny. Penny was the center of Sarah's life now, just as she was the center of his. They

might not be able to be in the same room with each other, let alone on the same coast, but their daughter was the one thing in their lives which forever joined them. He was grateful for that much, at least. Everything else between them had crumbled, but Penny sustained.

When Sarah had asked for the divorce, shortly before Penny's early graduation from High School a few months before she turned eighteen, he hadn't fought her. They'd tried for a while to make it work, but in the end he knew they were just going through the motions for their daughter's sake. When Penny announced her decision to attend UCLA, rather than Harvard, he had seen the writing on the wall. Sarah had moved out the week after Penny had left for college. A few months later, when the divorce was final, she had sold just about everything except the dog and the Corvette and left for California.

Initially, he'd been surprised to learn that she hadn't settled in L.A. She'd wanted to be close to Penny, of course, but she hadn't wanted to smother her. Still, he had to wonder at her choice of San Francisco. He'd thought that if she'd go anywhere, it would be to San Diego. She'd lived there before, when she'd been the JAG commander at Camp Pendleton. She had friends there. She had memories.

Of course, that might be the very reason she'd chosen San Francisco, he thought wryly. There were no memories here, in this city of mist and fog.

He understood that urge to escape. He'd done it himself, staying first at Belgravia, throwing himself into the horses and the details of the farm while he tied up the last of his business matters in Washington. He'd practically closed the house in Alexandria, spending his winters at Belgravia and his summers at Manderley, and returning to Alexandria only for Penny's occasional visits. He'd finally decided this year that it wasn't worth the effort, and put the Alexandria house on the market. It hadn't sold yet. There was something of a housing slump in DC at the moment, but the estate agent assured him it would be gone before the end of the summer. He still wasn't sure how he felt about it. Selling the house seemed so…final, but the reality was that things had been over long ago.

Things had been over from the first lie he'd told to Sarah. He just hadn't known it at the time. Secrets and lies: they had been his professional stock and trade. They had also been the small, silent landmines scattered beneath the surface of his personal life. Through the years, they had lain dormant, waiting patiently for someone to step on them and blow everything to hell. He'd just never expected that a dead man would be the one to trip the wire. The dead usually kept their secrets, especially the ones who were buried in far-off countries in unmarked graves. Leave it to Rabb to beat the odds, he thought wryly.

Scrubbing his good hand across his face, Clay sighed and shot a bleary glance back towards the dismal world beyond the window. It was still raining, and another bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, momentarily illuminating the graceful skeleton of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was the first glimpse of it he'd had all day, but he was too preoccupied with his thoughts to really notice it. --He wasn't going to do this again, damn it. He wasn't going to sit here and have a pity party and play 'what if,' and bemoan choices made and roads not taken.

You couldn't change the past, not for all the money on Wall Street, or all the power in Washington, he reminded himself. At the end of the day, it simply didn't matter which choice you made because you still ended up in the same damned place…alone with yourself. What you had done and where you had been didn't always matter as much as one might think. Sometimes it just came down to who you were inside. If you could live with that --live with yourself-- then you could accept whatever final destination fate led you to.

Harm had known that, he thought grimly. In those last few moments, he had understood that ultimate truth of life and embraced it. It had been something in his eyes, Clay thought, some indefinable emotion that was neither resignation, nor martyrdom. It was peace, Clay decided. Harmon Rabb had gone to his death willingly knowing that the final, unexpected resolution his life had come to was the result of the choices that he himself had made.

A flash of lightning lit the sky. Clay closed his eyes against both the brilliant bolt and the blaze of dark emotion that churned within him. He owed his life to Harm, and he'd spend what remained of it living with that knowledge.

_"That's the difference between us, Clay. You can live with it. I never could."_

A boom of distant thunder rolled in from the bay, rattling the sheer glass wall slightly and shaking from his mind the whispered words of a dead man, words that had been both a blessing and curse.

And that, Clay thought wearily, was the crux of it. No matter what he had done, no matter what he could or couldn't have done differently, he'd always known he could never really have Sarah. Whether he'd lied, or whether he'd told the truth, it really wouldn't have mattered. In the end, the outcome would inevitably have been the same. He'd always understood that he was destined to lose her. He'd tried telling himself long ago that women like Sarah Mackenzie simply didn't fall for men like him. They fell for men like Harmon Rabb, the knight in shining armor, the man in the white hat. How could they help it? He'd been hero, saint and savior all rolled into one. It was a role he had born to, and Harm had lived it all his life, right down to the end. He supposed that final act of their friendship had suited both of them: Rabb had been the Savior, and he had been Barabas.

Like the criminal spared at Christ's crucifixion, he had been both haunted and humbled by the experience. Ten long years he had lived with the secret, always grateful of the gift Harm had given him, always troubled by the magnitude of the debt and always terrified that someday, somehow, Sarah would learn the truth. That she would learn the truth, he'd never really doubted. Since the day they'd met, she and Harm had been inextricably linked to one another. Harm and Mac, Mac and Harm, they went together like peanut butter and jelly, salt and pepper, a matched set. You couldn't have one without the other, or rather you could, but you never got the full flavor of the experience. He'd been a fool to think it could be otherwise. God knew, she'd barely noticed him the first time they'd met. He, on the other hand, had felt the impact the moment he first laid eyes upon her. He'd been living with the aftershocks ever since.

A flash… a boom… and a long low rumble gently vibrated the beads of water clinging to the window. The cool, overhead lighting suddenly faltered as dark abyss outside flared with a spider web of lightning across the bay. For a fraction of a second it lit the city like a black and white negative, casting the bridges in stark relief against the storm-tossed silver waves, but Clay saw none of it. He was lost in another time and place, tossed about on the storms of memory.

_BOSNIA_

_AUGUST, 1992_

A flash…. a boom, and a long, steady tremor rattled the windows, shook the light fixtures and sent small showers of plaster dust sprinkling down upon their heads.

"Jesus! That was close!" Clay hunched over the open laptop, trying to shelter the key board from the small chunks of plaster that occasionally dropped from the cracks in the ceiling.

"Sodding Buggers!" a clipped English voice said from the other end of the room, "I think that one got the bloody transmitter. Did you get it all?"

Clay tapped a few more keys before glancing up to acknowledge the tall, auburn haired man who peered cautiously through a slit in the heavy drapes of their hotel room. "The answer to that, Dunc, is yes, and… yes."

"Terrific," His MI-6 counterpart abandoned his post at the window and came to stare over Clay's shoulder. "So, what did your lads send us?"

Clay opened the file. "Looks like profiles on Tatiana and Chernekov, and personnel jackets on the command staff at the Marine outpost down the road."

"What the devil for?" Black asked.

Clay opened the email, scanned it, and sighed. "The DDO has all of our black ops teams tied up on other missions. You'll have to talk to your own guys if you want to know what their excuse is."

"And I gather they expect us to skip down the road and ask the nice jarheads to help? Perhaps see if they would be so kind as to take some time from their busy schedules to hunt down Chernekov and his little psycho-bitch girlfriend and kill them for us?"

"Something like that."

"Marvelous," Duncan Black said dryly, "just bloody marvelous. Do we have any other options?"

Clay sighed and pushed away from the computer. "Not really." He shoved the machine towards Black. "Here, read it for yourself."

He needed a break. Too many nights of too little sleep and too much stress had combined into the mother of all headaches. If they didn't neutralize Chernekov soon, there was no telling the damage he could do to the fragile network of negotiations they were trying to arrange.

They'd found another village today. Or rather, what would have been a village if there had been any people left alive in it. The bastards hadn't even had the decency to try to hide the bodies; they'd simply left them where they'd fallen: women… children …old people… babies… Clay felt the bile threaten to rise to his throat again and swallowed hard. He shouldn't have allowed himself to think of what they had done to the infants. Christ, it was going to take a couple gallons of bleach to purge that image from his memory.

He crossed the room to the small vanity sink bolted to the wall and twisted the tap. Sickly, yellowish water leaked from the faucet in a tepid stream. Bending over the chipped and rust stained porcelain basin, he splashed some water on his face. He turned off the faucet and stood there for a long moment, jamming his thumbs hard into his temples.

"What's the matter with you?" Black asked, though he was already engrossed in opening and reading the downloaded files.

"Migraine," Clay grunted, pressing harder, willing the horrific images away.

"Low blood sugar, most likely," Black said, tapping rhythmically at the scroll key. "You didn't eat much today."

"I ate fine," Clay said darkly. "Two eggs, toast, sausage, coffee, a bottle of water and a package of trail mix."

Black raised an eyebrow. "I never saw it."

"I did," Clay said irritably, "Twice. It didn't look nearly as appetizing the second time around."

"Ah," Black said delicately, darting him a quick glance of comprehension. "I thought it took you a while to get that extra roll of film from the jeep."

A rocket screamed overhead, followed a moment later by impact, explosion and a long, sustained tremor. This time Duncan hovered protectively over the keyboard as the building shuddered, the furniture rattled and more plaster dust rained down from the ceiling.

"There goes the bloody neighborhood," he muttered. "I give that one a 4.8"

Clay sidled up to the window and risked a glance through the curtain. "More like a 5.2," he said, "it took the rest of the school down."

Duncan slowly uncurled himself from around the computer and blew dust from the screen. "It doesn't count, if it actually hit the building," he said.

"It didn't," Clay replied. "It hit the hospital down the street."

Both men worked very hard to not think about the implications of that. Their morbid little game of rating rocket barrages by the Richter scale was just one of a dozen distractions they had invented to survive the screaming madness that surrounded them, waking and sleeping.

The British agent snorted as he clicked on another file. "That's a 5.2? I don't think so." He glanced to the cracked and broken ceiling. "If that were a five-two, we'd be wearing the upstairs bed set by now."

"No," Clay said sardonically, "That would be a five-three. This building's better built than you think."

"You're just saying that because you picked this dump," Black grumbled.

There was another shriek, farther away, followed by a distant explosion that vibrated briefly through the room.

"Hellooo sweetheart…" Duncan murmured, "Now I'd give _her_ a five."

Clay stared at him. "Are you bent? That didn't even tilt the lampshade."

Black was grinning stupidly at the monochrome glow from the LCD monitor. "That's not the bombshell I'm talking about," he said.

Clay sighed and strode back across the room to the tiny table. "What are you into, Tatiana's profile?" He'd noticed that surveillance photos were attached, but had only glanced at them.

Webb shook his head as he took in Black's dazed adolescent expression over the top of the monitor. Dunc had definitely been out in the wilderness too long if he was drooling over pictures of that sadistic little witch. "Now I know you're crazy," he said. "She's got a nice body, but if we're going to start judging women on the Richter scale, I wouldn't give her more than a 3.1. –Sure, she might cause a few tremors, but no real damage."

Black's grin widened. "Not Tatiana," he said dreamily as he slowly spun the laptop around for Clay to see, "_her."_

He needed only a glance to see that it wasn't the agency profile on Tatiana Derevko. It was a Marine Corps Service record. Name, rank, serial number and current posting were bulleted out along the right hand side of the screen. He completely ignored them, staring instead at the black and white head shot of a female officer in Marine dress blues. He stared for one heartbeat. He stared for two. He was somewhere in the middle of the third one when he realized he should probably think about breathing again.

"Hello Major Damage," he murmured.

"Mackenzie, actually," Duncan said, turning the computer back slightly so that they both might enjoy the image. He forced a glance back to the right hand side of the screen. "Major Sarah Mackenzie, Marine JAG Corps, attached to Col. Rawlings Command, 1st Company, 3rd Marine Battalion. Been here…." Black paused and did some swift mental calculations, "eighteen months. She's rated expert with both rifle and pistol."

"She's got a pedigree, too," Clay observed, reading over Black's shoulder. "Her uncle is Matt O'Hara."

"So?"

"Congressional Medal of Honor winner," Clay murmured, reaching for the scroll key.

Black batted his hand away from the keyboard. "So?" he said again, his gaze fixed pointedly upon the grainy image.

Clay allowed himself to follow the Brit's distraction. "Good point," he said.

They mooned over the image a few moments longer. It had been a long time since either one of them had seen a woman, a real, living, breathing English speaking woman, that was. True, they had seen their share of female humans in the last few months, but far too many of them had been dead, and the ones that hadn't…. Well, he really didn't like to think about them –let alone what had been done to them. They were more ghosts, than women --living specters that haunted the streets, shattered and starving, venturing out to risk rape and death only for a few crumbs of food for themselves or their children. The woman on the computer screen before him looked nothing like them. She was …breathtaking.

"And she's just down the road?"

"So your lads seem to think," Duncan said.

"All right," Clay conceded, "I'll let your five stand for now, but come tomorrow morning, we may have to reconsider."

Black raised an eyebrow. "How so?"

"Because," Clay said, tapping a key on the laptop to enlarge the image on the monochrome LCD screen. "If she looks this good in black and white, it's got to be even better in color."  
…And God, she had been.

Another bolt of lighting streaked across the sky, startling Clay from his reverie and jolting him abruptly from the past. Still, the long fingers of memory plucked at him, reluctant to free him from that time and place, and for a moment the movement he saw reflected in the glass was not the slim, chic image of his daughter moving towards him, but the brisk, Amazon stride of Sarah Mackenzie. Even here, now, more than thirty years later he could still vividly recall that first encounter, barely more than an exchange of glances from across an exceptionally long and crowded conference table as Black had briefed Bull Rawlings and the rest of his command staff on the Chernekov mission.

He vaguely recalled the rising irritation he had experienced as Black and Rawlings had taken control of the meeting, squaring off like medieval combatants while everyone else had been relegated to the stands as spectators. However, as he'd allowed his gaze to occasionally stray across the conference table to the slim, dark haired woman with the ramrod straight posture and alluring, exotic features, he'd had to admit to himself that that wasn't what really pissed him off.

What really irritated him wasn't sitting there playing Duncan's man Friday and trying to keep his mind on business while Black and Rawlings engaged in their protracted little pissing match for superiority. What really irked him, boiled down to one simple thing:

He hadn't been able to keep his eyes off Major Sarah Mackenzie.

And she hadn't given him the time of day.


	3. Chapter 3: Tremors

**Part III: Tremors**

"She doesn't want to see you."

He fixed his bitter smile upon the worn reflection in the window, shielding it from Penny's gaze. Apparently not much had changed in three decades. Or rather, everything had changed, but it had come full circle. Only when he was certain that both his features and his demeanor were flat and composed did he turn to face his daughter.

"Too bad," he said tersely. "She doesn't have the luxury of dismissing me this time."

Penny bit her lip, a small worried crease appearing between her eyebrows. "Dad, it's not like that…"

He raised one doubting brow. "Oh no? Then why don't you tell me how it is?" he demanded.

Penny shifted nervously as she tried to frame the words. "I think," she began, and then hesitated as she reconsidered. "I think she's afraid to see you."

"Yeah? Well she should be," he snapped, "—especially after keeping something like this from me."

Penny shook her head. "No, Dad. I don't mean that. I mean…" Penny paused again, floundering for words. "She says that she doesn't want to see you, but I think that it's more that she doesn't want you to see her."

Clay stared at his daughter in confusion. "Come again?"

Penny tilted her head slightly, her attempt at a smile wobbling into a small and painful gesture. "She's kinda banged up from the fall, and with the chemo and everything…she's not exactly at her best right now."

He gripped his cane tightly as he slowly absorbed the import of Penny's words. "Let me get this straight," he said carefully, "You're telling me she doesn't want to see me because she's afraid of how she looks?"

Frankly, it took a moment to get his head around it, for while Sarah had always been beautiful and confident of her beauty, she'd never particularly struck him as vain. In all the years he'd known her before, during and after their marriage, he'd seen her in more than one unflattering situation. Dirty, sweaty, bloody, and tired, soaked to the skin or covered in three days worth of dust, she'd always been beautiful. –And since when did she start giving a damn about what he thought, anyway? He shook his head slowly. No, he wasn't going to let her off the hook that easily.

With grim determination, he swung out with his cane and began to make for the hallway only to be stopped by Penny's hand upon his arm. "No, Dad, please! You don't understand!"

Halting sharply, he rounded on his daughter with a voice that was eerily calm. "You're right, Pen. I don't understand. I don't understand why the two of you chose to shut me out of this. I don't understand why you wouldn't let me help. I don't understand why you lied to me. –And I certainly don't understand why your mother, who is one of the strongest people I've ever known, is—

He trailed off as he saw the thin stream of tears streaking down his daughter's face.

"You haven't seen her, Daddy." Penny whispered. "She's so fragile. You haven't seen what she looks like."

He felt the cold stab of fear slide down his backbone as he took in the naked emotion that was written across Penny's face. Clenching the head of his cane in a death grip he drew a deep breath. "I need to see her, Pen," he said softly. "I need to understand."

The silence fell between them, broken only by the soft roar of the rain outside the window and the low rumble of thunder. Wiping a hand across his face, Clay gathered his scattered thoughts.

"Go back to your mother," he said quietly. "Fix her hair, help her put on some make-up, do whatever she needs you to do so that she feels presentable enough to face me. I'll give you ten minutes, but then I'm coming in to see her."

"Dad," Penny said, her expression agonized, her voice pleading.

Resolutely he shook his head. "Ten minutes," he repeated.

She stared at him, her eyes brimming and then seeing that he would not be swayed, she nodded quickly and left. He did not turn to watch her go. Instead he stared blindly at the rain-distorted nightscape at the far end of the glass walled room. He had allowed Sarah to turn him away once before.

He would not make that mistake again.

The sound of Penny's footsteps faded quickly down the carpeted hallway and he leaned heavily upon his cane. Counting a silent twenty in his head, he struggled for control of both temper and composure. Only when he was certain that his daughter was out of both sight and earshot did Clay expel the long breath he had been holding. He darted a quick glance about the enormous waiting area. There were only a few other people present, all of them at the far end of the large room. None of them seemed to be paying him any mind. A massive planter filled with greenery divided the room. It was dominated by three giant potted palms and offered a bit of privacy to the small and quiet alcove where he had been sitting.

Retreating into a dim corner where the lush planter box curled protectively around a boxy overstuffed chair, Clay dropped down onto the hard cushions. He sat for a long moment staring at the intricate filigree pattern that laced across the silver head of his cane. His hands, he noted distantly, were shaking. Leaning forward, he closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the warm hard metal of the walking stick, silently willing the tremors to stop. God, it couldn't be true. It couldn't be real. Any minute now he was going to wake up alone in his bed at Manderley and find it all a nightmare. Wasn't he?

He slowly raised his head and stared at the uncomfortable looking couch across from him. No, apparently he wasn't dreaming, but at least the tremors in his hands had stopped. He collapsed back against the chair, feeling the exhaustion creep over him again. It was hard to fathom what Penny had told him. Sarah had always been a beautiful woman, and in his experience, she had only gotten better with age. She was strong, smart and confident. She was a fighter. –He better than anyone should know that. Sarah was afraid for him to see her? Sarah? He shook his head in bewilderment. Sarah afraid of anything was beyond his comprehension. Just how bad was this, anyway?

Bad, he decided, if Penny's part in this little conspiracy of silence was anything to judge by. It seemed to him that the two of them had been at swords points forever, and this was the first time he could recall her coming solidly down on her mother's side in… well, years.

Another long, low rumble of thunder rattled outside the window. He had to be careful, he told himself. The next ten minutes were going to be crucial. Here, alone, in the relative privacy of this quiet spot, he had to hold it together. Somewhere in the brief span of time he had allotted Penny, he had to reach inside himself and find that other Clayton Webb, the one he used to be, the one that Sarah had loved and hated with equal measure. That was the persona he needed now, that intense, agenda-driven man who could divorce thought from emotion with the flip of a switch. He must resurrect that arrogant, calculating son of a bitch who could argue, persuade and act purely upon cold, hard logic. Somewhere in the next ten minutes, he must find that man; become that Webb, because if he didn't, he was going to come apart completely.

It had been a very long time since he'd had to call upon that other side of himself, and yet he knew it was still there, still waiting and lurking in the shadows of his mind. For a while, he'd tried to believe that he'd left that part of himself behind when he'd retired from the Agency. Still, in the small hours of the sleepless nights that occasionally haunted him, he knew better. Loathe as he was to admit it, that dark splinter of his soul was as much a part of him as the sarcasm and the three piece suits.

He hadn't always been this way. Once upon a time, before he'd joined the CIA, he'd been a different person, a singular personality, a whole man. Hard as it was to believe, there had been a time when he had been a human being, rather than the Tin Man that Sarah had so often accused him of personifying.

Much of it, of course, had to do with the clandestine mindset that ruled the Company. The CIA lived, breathed and preached compartmentalization, not just of the organizational body, but of the individual mind. Even as they divided their employees, one from another, in the name of secrecy and National Security, so they divided the inner chambers of the mind and soul. Thought must be held separate from feeling. Feelings themselves must be divided, physical from emotional. Logic must be considered apart from morality or even ethics. Every piece of information, every fiber of a situation, must be pulled one from another, separated, sorted and carefully analyzed before a decision could be made and a course of action determined.

The psyche of an intelligence agent was disassembled, analyzed and reconstructed in much the same way. He supposed it was done with the intent of instilling each operative with a particular mindset, honed, polished and capable of adapting to any situation. To an extent, it worked. In the eyes of unknowing outsiders, such people as himself possessed a keen, multifaceted personality. Swift and sure, flexible and perceptive, they were master manipulators, playing upon the strengths and weaknesses of those around them to orchestrate the outcomes they desired. The view from inside such a mind, however, was not quite so certain or composed.

It was, he supposed, a mild form of dissociative disorder encouraged by training and permanently etched into the psyche by the need for emotional survival. In the beginning, he had told himself he was simply playing a role. Like a mask or a series of disguises he could take off or change at will, he schooled himself to play the part required by the job at hand: bureaucrat, diplomat, multi-millionaire, army officer, yes-man. It was easy. Nothing of what he said or did really touched him. He was good at his job. He had been born to it.

Then the jobs got harder.

Field agent, case officer, interrogator….assassin… he shifted from one to the other, consciously telling himself that it wasn't really him, but the job that he must do. Twenty-five years later, he could still remember with crystal clarity the night he realized the folly of that rationalization.

It had been Afghanistan, where the heat baked you by day and temperatures plummeted at sunset. He would always remember that night. Crisp and frozen with the icy chill of the fading winter, dark and dreary with only the barest suggestion of the coming spring, he had felt the cold all the way to the marrow of his bones. It wasn't the temperature that had chilled him. Rather it was what he had glimpsed inside of himself.

He had spent five months in Afghanistan, working every asset, tracking every lead in his relentless search for Mustafa Atef, the terrorist known as the Architect who had been the key mastermind behind 9/11. They had captured the bastard, had brought him to trial before a military tribunal only to discover Atef's brother, Kabir, was in the midst of orchestrating an equally devastating plot involving a Russian submarine. His stable of well-paid informants and rounds of interrogation had eventually led him to a man, a prisoner in the detention camp in the Darya Bulkh Valley and a rumored associate of the brothers Atef. For two days and two nights he had interrogated the man. He had been ruthless, relentless and brutal. He had done things in that dingy, reeking, overheated shack that even now he did not like to think about, but which he had told himself must be done. Time was running out and he'd needed that information. In the end, he had found only one way to get it.

'_Kill him.'_

He still remembered that order, could still feel the words forming on his tongue. Though he had not allowed himself eye contact, he had sensed the fear that radiated from the battered man tied to the chair. He knew the reason for that terror, had shared it himself. Like the broken husk of the man before him, he felt the sincerity in those words, and knew that when he walked through that door into the cold desert night, there would be no going back. The man he had spent the last forty-eight hours torturing for an answer would die for the lack of one.

In the end, the man had broken, but so had the image Clayton Webb had held of himself. In spite of its importance, and the deadly mark in history that it had narrowly averted, the knowledge that he had been right was a cold comfort. The prisoner's frightened, sputtering words were only a dim and hazy memory to him now. Much more sharply etched into his memory was the moment when he had stepped from that filthy shack into the crisp, clear chill of the desert night. It was the sensations he remembered now, the icy air filling his lungs and chilling his mind, the faint trembling that shivered along his limbs and the overwhelming sensation of exhaustion that mingled with both loathing and relief.

It was in that instant that the illusion collapsed. Halfway between the barracks and the military Humvee that waited for him, engine idling and driver ready, his step had slowed and stopped. He'd stood there for a long moment, absorbing the sounds of the desert night and known that there was no sense in pretending anymore. What he done back there had not been an act. The pain and fear he had inflicted upon the prisoner had not been a role he was playing. It had been real. In those crucial moments of interrogation he had carried out his unpleasant business with both purpose and intent and nothing that felt like remorse. Clayton Webb had done those things, and Clayton Webb would have to live with them.

It was the first time he'd acknowledged the reality of who and what he had become, and on some silent inner level of his soul, the realization had shaken him. He wasn't simply a man working to protect and defend his country. He lied, manipulated and inflicted pain, he killed without remorse, and it only got easier each time he had to do it. It was then that he realized just how a man could lose his soul. It didn't happen all at once, with some great heinous deed that could not be atoned for. It happened slowly, over time, eroding away in little bits and pieces until one day you looked up and realized there was nothing left.

He should know. As it was, there was damned little left of him now.

Using the cane to pull himself up, he felt the old restlessness settle over him. With the mahogany stick steadying his steps, he returned to rain spattered view and stared both out and in at the dual image reflected in the glass. If anything, it was raining harder now. Small jets of water sprayed up from beneath the tires of the cars on the street below, their headlights casting shiny waves on the dark, wet pavement. At the same time, he saw his own reflection leaning heavily on his cane, one hand thrust into the pocket of his dark trousers.

It was like looking at a ghost, he thought grimly. A little older, a lot grayer, but essentially the same cool, controlled expression he had worked so hard to cultivate over the years. He could feel the old persona now, wrapping itself around him, cloaking his barely controlled emotion in that brusque, unflappable demeanor that Sarah had always loathed. Ironic, he thought, that it was the very part of himself which she hated that he must now summon to her bedside.

Penny, he decided, was his best ally and strongest argument. The toll this crisis had taken on their daughter was evident. Sarah would rather cut off her own hand than accept his help, but even if she wouldn't see reason about her own well-being, she'd rather die than hurt Penny. Even so, he was not looking forward to the confrontation he was about to engage in.

He straightened a little, sparing a small motion here or there to straighten a cuff and snug his tie. His fingers trailed absently over the deep red silk of his early birthday present. Odd choice for Penny, he thought. She rarely bought him clothing, and never ties, except for Father's Day. Those, however, were invariably of a style that should never be allowed to see the light of day for fear of violating international laws of fashion and good taste. No, this was both vibrant and sensible, something more like Sarah once would have chosen for him back in the days when they still shopped for each other. His hand fell away from the expensive fabric with a twinge of regret. It was simply more proof that his little girl was growing up …and that he was growing old.

He surveyed the shadow of his reflection with a sense of irony. Penny had said that Sarah didn't want to see him because she was afraid of how she looked, of the physical weakness that he would see. He doubted that it had ever occurred to either one of them that he might be even more terrified of what Sarah would see in him. In all the years he'd known her; it was the only thing he'd ever truly been afraid of.

The old Webb descended over him completely then, dropping into place the steel curtain that divided reason from emotion. Enough, he thought grimly. This was not the time for doubt or introspection. He could not afford to lose it in there. He could not let her see how angry he was…or how frightened. He had to stay calm, stay rational, not an easy task when she was likely ready to start sparring with him the moment he stepped into the room. Old habits died hard.

Outside, the thunder boomed, rattling the glass before him. The vibration moved gently through the glass to the floor beneath his feet. It was a shaky, spidery feeling, not unlike the one that quaked his insides. He regarded himself again in the glass. Perfectly poised, perfectly still, …and perfectly terrified, though no one outside himself would ever know it.

From behind him, he heard a small rustle of movement, but did not turn.

"Dad? You can see her now."


	4. Chapter 4: Fault Lines

**Part IV: Fault Lines**

She looked like hell.

Sarah Mackenzie tilted the plastic compact in her hand and scowled with distaste at the reflection it presented. The tiny mirror embedded in the lid of the pressed powder kit was so small as to be practically useless. Unfortunately, it was no less forgiving for all that it did not reveal. She raised the mirror to eye level, taking in the sunken hollows in her cheeks and below her eyes. Beneath the heavy coating of makeup, she could still see the bruised shadows and sickly yellow pallor of her skin. She cursed softly as she snapped the case shut and flung it into the shallow drawer of the bedside table. Pen had made a valiant, if futile attempt. No amount of foundation, powder, blush and shadow was going to hide the damage she had sustained. There wasn't a shade of lipstick bright enough to distract Clay from the fact that her hair was thin and brittle, her olive complexion khaki, and that her bones were protruding through her skin. Nothing could hide the fact that she was dying slowly, one day at a time.

If there was a worse time for her ex-husband to show up on her doorstep, she couldn't possibly imagine it.

Sagging back into her pillows, she closed her eyes and let the exhaustion wash over her. She really shouldn't be surprised. Clay had always had impeccable timing. He was like the proverbial bad penny; inevitably turning up at the moment you least wanted him. It had been foolish to think she could keep this from him forever. Frankly, she was surprised to have managed as long as they had. Even so, she had hoped it would keep a little longer. A few more months –or maybe even weeks—and she might not have had to face him at all. She wouldn't have to admit to him that all her choices had been the wrong ones. She wouldn't have had to bear his sympathy.

That, she thought wryly, was almost reason enough to welcome death. Clay had never done sympathy well –especially when it was sincere. There was something broken in him that seemed to cause him trouble in both expressing and accepting it. It made him stilted, awkward, almost mechanical, and it made her think again of the Tin Man, rusty at emotions because he lacked a heart to generate them. In this case, however, the metaphor didn't fit. Clay had definitely had a heart. She should know. She'd been the one to break it.

"Lights," she snapped irritably, "forty percent." The overhead lighting dimmed obediently in response to the verbal command. She let her eyes wander to the dimly glowing fixtures recessed into the ceiling. Thirty years ago when she'd read magazine articles about homes of the future with household appliances that communicated with each other and refrigerators that could take your messages and order your groceries, she hadn't believed it. The fact that she'd lived to see it all come to pass was just more proof that she'd lived too damned long.

The low lighting helped to hide the frail lines of her body, but temptation to drift into sleep was strong and she had to fight it, straightening herself up against her pillows. She might feel like crap, but she didn't dare show it in front of Clay. He could smell weakness like a shark could smell blood in water, and even if she didn't know what he was hoping to accomplish with this little ambush, she was fairly certain that she wasn't going to like it.

God, what did he want with her? Why was he insisting on putting them both through this torture again? She certainly didn't want to see him. He couldn't possibly want to see her. Not now. Not after all this time. Not after all the years of misery they had inflicted upon each other. Still, he was doing it, and somehow, in some way, she was going to have to find the strength to face him.

She heard him long before his shadow filled her doorway. It was the footsteps, slow and deliberate and so perfectly paced. They might have been set to the precise, unwavering beat of a metronome were it not for the subtle hesitation. It was that pause which put the measured steps just a fraction of a second off. It was a distinctive sound, like a discordant note in a musical ensemble, never quite in tune with the rest of the music.

In her mind's eye, she could almost picture him, walking slowly down the long tiled expanse of the hallway, swinging his cane in time with the practiced stride of his recalcitrant left leg. She realized that he must be silently counting off each step in his head. When Clay focused carefully upon the task, he could suppress the limp to a barely noticeable hitch in his once lithe gait. On the surface of things, this might seem like a rather small accomplishment, but it was an effort which had demanded a monumental combination of money, modern medicine and sheer determination to achieve. Even now, after all these years of physical therapy, it required a great deal of concentration for him to walk normally. Still, it was a far cry from the days when he'd drug himself about the house like a wounded Quasimodo.

She wondered if he would ever forgive her for that.

Oh, she knew he didn't blame her for the stroke, even though she'd been the one who'd finally convinced him to have the surgery the doctors had been pressing for. He'd known the risks going in, and he had accepted them. It was what had come afterwards that he couldn't abide. It was the days and nights she'd spent at his bedside in the hospital room at Kresge. It was the stoic way she had accepted the news of his disability and gone about re-structuring their lives to accommodate it. There were the necessary decisions she'd made without consulting him: the wheelchair ramp and elevator she'd had installed at the house before he came home, the personal nurse she hired to attend his needs, the physical therapy appointments she arranged her schedule around to drive him to.

Worst of all were the little things, the small intimate details that any wife would attend to in caring for a sick husband. It was in the way she cut his meat for him at dinner until his hand was strong enough to clutch the fork. It was those grim, silent moments when she helped him to shower and dress on the days that John was not available to do it. It was in the way she automatically put out her hand to steady him whenever she thought he was about to fall, or picked him up off the floor when he actually did. In the end, it really only boiled down to one thing: in spite of everything that had happened between them, she had stayed with him throughout the worst period of his life. He resented the hell out of her for that. At the time, she hadn't understood it, but she did now.

Oh, God, did she understand now.

It was one thing to care for a person out of love, but entirely another to do it out of… she hesitated. What had it been, duty? No, she decided, even that might have been more palatable. Clay had called it martyrdom, but that wasn't right either. Guilt, she decided at last. It had been guilt, pure and simple, because at the end of the day she knew that she was the one who had brought them to this. She was the one who had clung to Harm's memory, but Clay was the one who'd ended up paying the price, body and soul.

The shadow fell across her doorway, blocking out the bright sterile light from the hallway as he paused upon her threshold. She knew he must be glancing at the small paper placard posted just outside her door with the name written in heavy black marker: Mackenzie, S. He couldn't be surprised. He had known she'd given up his name. She wondered if it bothered him, as it sometimes did her.

Apparently it didn't, for he suddenly strode through her doorway with the same amount of brusque arrogance that once had carried him into the inner sanctum of the Admiral's office. He managed a whole five steps before he saw her clearly, and what he saw must have been far from what he'd expected, for he stopped abruptly. His gaze cut through her, sharp and green. She saw the tiny shift in his features before he jerked forward, sweeping past the foot of her bed without so much as a backwards glance. She didn't know what cut more deeply, the cold dismissal or that brief expression of naked horror that he had been unable to conceal.

Clay had always been a lousy poker player. When she and Harm had first met him, his every reaction had shown instantly upon his face. The dangers of intelligence work being what they were, he had quickly learned the necessity of control. Over time, he had learned to school his features into that flat, impenetrable stare that gave no hint as to what he was really thinking. Only on exceptionally rare occasions, when someone who knew him well pushed his buttons and watched carefully, could the fleeting micro-expressions be discerned. She had been watching. She had seen it, and the knowledge of what he had seen in her, of how she must look to him, was even worse than she had imagined. She drew her blankets more closely around her, repressing the urge to pull them over her head completely. Instead, she forced her eyes to follow him as he finally reached the window and the silence filled the room. God, it wouldn't be so bad if he would just look at her, just say something…anything… but he didn't. He just stood there, staring intently out the window at some object in the darkness less hideous than she.

The rain was letting up now. Webb noted it almost absently as he struggled to regain control. He'd thought he'd been prepared for this; thought that he'd had himself firmly in hand when he'd stood there outside that hospital room door studying the paper card that listed her name, but not his. He should have known better. No matter how hard he tried to be Webb, she always managed to get around him. She always managed to find Clay. He'd felt the two distinct halves of himself fracture and separate the moment he'd stepped through the door. It had been strange, like looking at her through two different sets of eyes. Clay had seen only the bruised features, the skin, sunken and sallow, that stretched like old parchment across her bones. He had recoiled at the horror of it. It was Webb, however, who had noted the ramrod straight posture, the stubborn tilt to her chin, and had coldly reminded him that he had seen worse. –Hell, he had _done_ worse. It was Clay who had hesitated, who had wanted to go to her, who had wanted to run… who had threatened to crumble right there on the spot. But it was Webb who had taken over, ruthlessly shoving him towards the safety of the window.

In the silence that built between them, he could feel her pulling at him, waiting for him to say something, demanding that he turn and face her. He couldn't do it. He wasn't ready for that yet. Neither, he suspected, was she.

He was operating on instinct now, and instinct told him to say nothing. Instead, in the habit of the experienced interrogator, he allowed the silence to intensify. She would recognize the tactic, and it would make her angry, but she would respond to it all the same. Sarah –no, Mac—was not a patient woman.

At least she never had been, but now he could feel the seconds ticking by and wondered if perhaps he had miscalculated. He felt the scrutiny of her gaze sweeping down his body as thoroughly as a cop patting down a suspect. His mouth went suddenly dry, his palms clammy. It took every ounce of self-control he possessed to keep his eyes fixed intently on the few scattered cars in the parking lot below. He sensed the pause in her inspection midway down his body and resisted the urge to look down at the hand that held the cane. The stroke had cost him his sense of touch along with his fine motor skills. Over the years, he had learned to use the cane to great effect in disguising the full extent of his disability. However, he had also landed on his face enough times to develop the unconscious habit of testing the grip of his reluctant fingers. He could allow her to see the imperfections of his body, he reminded himself. It was the inner frailties which he must conceal.

"You're looking well." After the lengthy silence, her simple observation jolted him. He wondered that the cane didn't go clattering to the floor.

Slowly he turned to face her. This time he was careful to look at her with only Webb's sharp, dissecting gaze. He took it all in slowly-- the blue silk scarf that covered her head, the gaunt, almost skeletal features, the IV line taped into her bony arm—every detail was noted and catalogued with cold, analytical precision.

Frankly, even Webb was having trouble reconciling the woman that had once been Sarah Mackenzie with the fragile specter in the bed. The woman he had known, the one he had spent most of his adult life fighting with and for, seemed to have been reduced to a pale, listless shell. The Mac he remembered was spirited and fiery and always spoiling for a fight. This woman didn't seem to have an ounce of fight left in her. She looked as if she had given up on almost everything, including life. She looked like Death walking, and the cold spark of resentment burning in her eyes dared him to deny it. The part of him that was Clay, desperately wanted to, but the part that was Webb knew better than to try.

He took moment to consider his words before he spoke them, knowing how they would affect her, knowing what a bastard he was going to be for actually saying them, but he could think of no other way. He had to make her angry. He had to make her fight, because maybe, just maybe, if he could make her fight him, she might just be stirred enough to fight for herself. Anything would be better than this pool of apathy she had allowed herself to wallow in.

He let his gaze rake over her again, colder this time, as he finally spoke.

"I wish I could say the same, but you never were one to accept platitudes."

"And you were never one to give them," she replied, her voice cool. "Why are you here, Clay?"

Clay. The sound of his name on her lips pulled at him, and he steeled himself against it. Distance, he reminded himself. He had to put emotional distance between them if he hoped to play this gambit, and there was really only one way he could think to accomplish that. He took a single step forward, away from the window, and was rewarded with the slight shift of her body as she retreated into the far railing of the bed.

"I'm here for Penny," he said simply.

"You can do that from the waiting room," she said irritably. "You don't need to see me."

"Actually, Mac, I disagree."

She flinched at his use of the old nickname. It was a sharp reminder that they were no longer all the things they once had been to each other. Clay and Sarah had left the building. All that was left was Webb and Mac. He saw the flicker of acknowledgement in her eyes slowly kindle into the old adversarial flame that had so often marked their professional relationship, and felt the small, cold bite of satisfaction. The rules of engagement had been established. Let the games begin.

With careful precision, he positioned the tip of his cane upon a point equidistant from polished toes of his handmade Italian shoes. Rocking forward slightly, he leaned into the silver-tipped handle and folded his good hand over his bad one, stilling the telltale tremors that threatened to betray his carefully constructed façade. Subtle as the maneuver was, it did not go unnoticed. Her brown eyes fixed upon his hand and then swung to his face. One dark brow arched slightly, her pupils sparking with a knowing light.

He acknowledged her silent salvo with a small tilt of his head and the faint, unflappable smile that pulled at the right side of his mouth. No, damn it, he wasn't as good as he was making out to be, but the fact that she knew it didn't bother him. It was simply an aspect of who he was: a manipulator, a chameleon… a sham.

Folding her arms across her breasts, she tilted her head to glare up at him, fairly bristling with that familiar mixture of suspicion and irritation. "All right, Webb, you wanted this. Go ahead. Make your pitch."

Moving halfway to the bed, he hooked his cane over the back of the chair provided for visitors and shoved his hands into his pockets, making a bold show of standing on his own two feet. "There's a clinic in Bern that's had some good results with gene therapy." His voice fell naturally into the same brusque tones he'd used when delivering an intelligence briefing, the cadence rising and falling with an almost clinical detachment. "Apparently there's been a great deal of success in cloning healthy bone marrow. They use a combination of cells gathered from both the patient and a genetically compatible donor. It's shown promising results even in late stage cancer patients and complete remissions from stage II and even stage III cancer. You can be transferred there as early as next week."

"No."

"No?"

"No." She said firmly. "I don't want your charity, Webb."

"You don't need my charity," he snorted. "You can pay it yourself. –Or you could if you'd quit giving everything to Penny. You know, she isn't likely to end up in the poor house any time soon."

Mac tilted her head defiantly. "She's going to end up with it all anyways. What does it matter to you? It's my damned money; I can do what I want with it."

He shook his head with mild amusement. "You just don't want it because it started out as my damned money." One thinning brow rose in arch antagonism. "You know, half the trophy wives in Washington would kill for your divorce settlement."

"Been shopping for trophy wives, have you?"

He fixed her with that damnable smirk, the one that always made her want to shoot him. "What's the matter, Mac? Jealous?"

She shook her head in disgust. "Only in your dreams."

He exhaled with a sharp, short and humorless chuckle, brushing the tip of his tongue across his lower lip. "Sweetheart, you have no idea."

Something in her expression suggested that she had a better idea than he supposed, and it made him wonder just what Penny had told her, or what she might have heard. He studied her closely and was struck by a sudden flash of insight, swift and certain.

"You _are_ jealous," he observed, not quite able to disguise the note of wonder in his voice.

Mac shifted uncomfortably. "Of you and your blonde bimbos? –Hardly."

His brow furrowed. --Blonde bimbos? What in the hell was she talking about? He hadn't even been out with a woman in months, and that was just…. Catherine.

He drew back slowly as comprehension dawned. It had been the Orchid Ball –the annual Washington Charity event for disadvantaged children. His mother made generous contributions to it over the years through the family foundation, and he had continued the practice, finding it both a worthy cause and a decent tax-write off. The only drawback was that the honor and expense of planning the celebrated event was regularly passed around between the major donors that composed the committee. As Chairman of the Elliot Forbes Porter Foundation, he had been dismayed when the dubious honor had finally come round to him. When his mother had still been alive, it was a task he'd gladly handed over to her. As one of the Grande Dames of the Washington cocktail circuit, Porter was fairly in her element when planning such events. The last time he'd drawn the short straw, Sarah had grudgingly taken on the challenge. It had cost him a new Corvette and a two-week family vacation in Europe --complete with an excruciating visit to Euro-Disney-- but he still considered it a bargain.

This time, however, he was completely on his own. Sarah and Penny, for obvious reasons, were out of the question. He'd tried asking Caroline, but his younger sister had made it plain that she'd sooner drink cyanide than wade back into the Washington viper pit.

He was complaining of his plight over lunch one afternoon with Catherine Gale and Victor, when Catherine had unexpectedly volunteered to relieve him of the ordeal. She didn't have to offer twice. He'd given her a checkbook with a line of credit equal to the treasury of a small nation and placed the matter entirely into her capable hands.

He really had thought nothing of it at the time. Looking back now, he realized that perhaps he should have. The Washington cocktail circuit was a notorious assembly line of rumor and speculation, and Catherine's appointment as his hostess had not gone without comment. Neither had the photo that had run in the society pages after the ball. That, he thought wryly, had been a money shot if ever there was one. Of course, as with so many stories run by the media, it had been taken completely out of context. They'd been standing on the stage in front of the band as he'd made his brief obligatory speech to thank everyone for both their hard work and generosity. He'd turned to Catherine then, smiled down at her and unthinkingly bent to drop a quick kiss of gratitude upon her lips when the flashbulbs had gone off. His old friend had sighed and smiled wryly.

"Good one Webb," she had muttered. "You do know that that will be all over the society pages by breakfast."

"So?"

"So, I do have a social life outside of Wednesday lunches with you and Victor. We'll be grist for the Washington gossip mill for months."

"Let 'em grind," he had said. "This is D.C. There's a scandal born every twenty minutes. It'll be old news by lunchtime tomorrow."

Except that for some reason completely beyond his powers of comprehension, the damned photo had been picked up by the AP and had run in New York, Boston, Chicago and Miami. He had even fielded a sly call from Duncan Black in London, much to his chagrin.

Apparently it had made the San Francisco papers, too. And even if it hadn't, he shouldn't be all that surprised that Sarah would have heard. Bobbie, Bud and Harriet were still solidly in her corner. They wouldn't want her to be blindsided, reading about it in a paper or magazine or hearing about it from someone else. Which suggested what?

Webb turned this new revelation over in his mind, examining it from every angle. It wasn't a situation he had planned or would even have wished for, and if his instincts were correct then Sarah's suspicions of him could not be farther from the truth. Still, the ruthless negotiator inside of him whispered, there might be something in this he could turn to his advantage. She had him just as off-balance as he had her, but this small misconception might be just what he needed to keep her from realizing it. He decided to play to her assumptions.

"Nice try, Mac, but this doesn't have anything to do with Catherine and I."

Her fingers clenched on her crossed forearms, and he knew that his shot in the dark had found its mark. "This is about you jumping off this emotional merry-go-round you're riding with our daughter and getting some decent medical treatment."

"What!"

He folded his arms across his own chest, mirroring her pose. "A year ago the two of you couldn't get through a weekend together. Now you can barely get her to leave your side. You've got to admit, there's nothing like a little medical crisis to clear the air. It must be nice to be able to talk to her again."

He knew it was a sign of how sick she really was that she didn't come bolting up off the bed to attack him. That didn't stop the nuclear detonation of her temper.

"You son of a bitch! How dare you!" she hissed, struggling to sit up against her pillows. Her knuckles clutched white against the bed rails. "How dare you insinuate that I'd use this to manipulate Penny!"

He tilted his head slightly. "I'm just calling it like I see it, Mac."

She glowered up at him, her rich dark eyes brimming with fury. "Last I checked, you were the master manipulator in this family."

Webb shrugged. "It takes one to know one," he said easily, and then uncrossed his arms. He tightened his grip on the back of the chair and leaned in; preparing to pounce upon her slip in much the same way that Tigger would spring upon a Robin. "And the last time I checked, we weren't exactly a family anymore."

"And who's fault is that?" she demanded.

He looked at her for a long moment then slowly pulled away. "Ours," he said. The word was filled with such simple, unvarnished honesty that it took both of them a moment to digest it.

"You signed the papers," she said at last. Her voice sounded small in the stillness of the room.

"You served them," he replied, his voice just as quiet.

"You lied to me, Clay."

"You said you'd try to forgive me." He turned away and sighed, raking a hand through his hair. "You couldn't do it."

"I tried."

Plucking the cane from the back of the chair, he returned to the window. The rain had stopped. The sparsely scattered cars in the parking lot glistened under the sickly yellow beams of the sodium lights. He closed his eyes briefly, wanting to hold in the words, but it was already too late.

"Not hard enough."

She flinched at the retort, the stinging accusation in his tone just as bitter now as it had always been. She didn't know how to make him understand. She had tried. She really had, but in the end she had discovered that it was impossible. One couldn't grant forgiveness, not when one shared so much in the blame. In spite of what he might think, in spite of what she had allowed him to believe, he wasn't the only guilty party here. She had certainly contributed her share.

The fact of the matter was that he hadn't actually lied to her. He simply hadn't come forward with the truth. Nor was he really to blame for Harm's death. What had happened had been Harm's choice alone, and he had chosen to die as he had chosen to live: selflessly.

No, if Clay was guilty of anything, it was not calling her on her own feelings for Harm, muddled as they had always been. In all the years of their marriage, he had allowed her to tiptoe around it. She'd never understood why until that terrible day in Arlington when they'd stood over the grave that was supposed to be Harm's and he had finally admitted all of the awful truth. It was only then that she had seen the doubt that riddled him, the fear that of the two of them, she had always loved Harm more …and always would.

He had begged for her forgiveness that day, she hadn't been able to grant it. At the time, she'd been too shocked, too wounded, to understand why. It was only much later, when she finally began to process it, that she fully understood the reason. By then, it was too late. Clay had had the surgery and the stroke and he'd been so bitter, so fixed upon his perception of her pity for him that she hadn't been able to broach the subject. After a while, there seemed no point in even trying.

She swallowed hard, remembering the day of AJ Robert's wedding, a few short weeks before Penny's graduation. That, she thought, had been the end of things. Penny had helped him from the limo and up the wide stone steps of the church before rushing off to take her place in the wedding party. She had been coming to take her customary place at his left side, had reached to put a steadying hand beneath his arm when he'd suddenly, viciously, shrugged away from her. She would never forget the anger in his eyes, the determination evident in every line of his body as he held desperately to that damned cane. She'd stood there and watched him as he moved down the aisle without her, walking slowly, steadily and alone. It was then that she understood he didn't need her any more than Penny did. That was when she knew that it was over. He was never going to give her another chance. She had passed up too many chances with him.

"You gave up on me," she said quietly.

"You let me."

A few more silent moments passed between them as she contemplated this. She supposed there was truth in that statement. Clay was nothing if not an eternal pessimist. All the years of their marriage, all that time she'd stayed with him during his recovery, he'd silently been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Of course he would have expected her to leave him. He'd just been waiting for the obvious milestones to pass: as soon as Penny was grown and out of the house, as soon as he didn't need her anymore, then she would go. Damn him for always having to be right.

She wondered now what would have happened if she had stayed. How long would it have taken? A month? Two? Six? Would it have even mattered at all? She'd never know. She hadn't been able to take any more. She'd drawn up the divorce papers the week before Penny's graduation. She'd left for California before the summer was even gone. She closed her eyes as a fresh wave of pain washed over her. It all seemed so long ago. It was too late to do anything about it now. So why did it still hurt so much?

"You're right," she said softly. "We're both to blame."

Clay nodded slowly, but did not turn back to face her. He couldn't. Somewhere in the middle of things, he'd lost control. He'd broken his own rules, allowed them to become Clay and Sarah again. It was dangerous ground. Webb and Mac merely strafed each other from a distance, but as Clay and Sarah they flayed each other to the bone.

"Did you really mean what you said?" It took him a moment to register that she had spoken.

"About what?" he asked.

"About Penny." There was something in her voice, a vulnerable note, and it tore at him as nothing else could. Still, he'd promised himself that he'd never lie to her again, and though it was probably too little too late, he wasn't about to go back on that now.

He dropped his chin in another small, almost imperceptible nod. "Yes," he said honestly, "though I doubt it was intentional. You've obviously had a lot on your mind."

"Damn you, Clay," her voice was tired and eerily calm. "I didn't want your money, and I certainly don't want your pity. Quit dancing around and just tell me what you're talking about."

Pushing back the louvered slats of the vertical blinds, he peered down at the traffic beyond the parking lot. "Apparently you haven't noticed, but our daughter is a wreck."

"She's fine."

He shot her a glance over his shoulder, a sour expression crossing his features. "I was married to you long enough to know how much water that holds. She's tied herself in knots worrying about you."

He could see by her expression that she didn't believe him. All right. He had an answer for that, too.

"Did you know she went through a bone marrow biopsy to see if she would be a compatible donor for you?"

Her cheeks, already deathly pale, seemed to bleach even whiter. "What?" she gasped, "When did she do that?"  
"Last spring," he said grimly. His murky, moss-colored eyes drilled into her, monitoring every nuance of her expression.

He saw the mixture of shock, fury, and confusion moving across her face and decided to spare her the effort of shrieking at him. The last thing he needed was to bring a barrage of nurses down upon them. It would take them all of three seconds to determine that the best way to calm the patient was to eject the ex-husband from the room. Considering that this was the first audience he'd had with her in a year and a half, he wasn't about to risk it.

"I didn't know," he said firmly. "I found out in the waiting room when she dropped this little bombshell on me." He gestured to indicate the hospital bed in which Mac lay, and the small assortment of monitors that stood beside it.

"I never would have let her do it if I'd known," Mac murmured, her fingers twisting in the white linen sheets.

Clay snorted. "That was precisely why she didn't tell you."

"Was anyone with her?"

He shook his head. "Not as far as I can tell. Katie knew, maybe, but I doubt it."

If Katie known, he reasoned, then she would have known about Penny's cover story of the two of them spending Spring Break in Seattle. She would never have picked up the phone when the caller ID had announced his number.

"Someone should have been there." Mac said.

Clay nodded. "I would have been, but God forbid anyone let me into the loop," he said dryly, and then sighed. "At the very least, she could have called Caroline." Penny had taken advantage of her time in California to become better acquainted with her aunt, and the two had become fast friends.

Mac sagged wearily back into her pillows. "She wouldn't call Caroline," she sighed. "Caroline would have told you."

He nodded. It was true. Caroline and Penny had fallen into the habit of frequent shopping trips and weekly lunches and he regularly fielded calls from both of them. Much as he missed Pen, it was probably the most communication he'd had with his sister since their childhood, and he took comfort in the fact that he could count on Caroline to keep an eye on things. –And well she had, he thought ruefully. If it hadn't been for Caro's insistence that he come out to celebrate Thanksgiving at her house and spend some time with his daughter, he'd likely never have tumbled to what was going on.

"Damned right she would have," he rapped. "Caroline loves Penny almost as much as we do. She'd never allow her to go through this alone."

"Pen wasn't alone," Mac retorted.

Clay held up his good hand. "I know. She had you. You had each other. It's a Hallmark moment. There's just one problem there, Mac. You're both too damned busy putting on a brave face and being there for each other. Neither one of you has ever stopped to consider what you're going to do when both of you break down at the same time."

He looked at her, his eyes searching hers. "Who's going to do that, Sarah?" he asked pointedly. "Who's going to hold you when you finally come apart? Pen has Katie and Caroline and me –or at least she would have if you'd have allowed it. Who do you have?"

She didn't answer, but then he hadn't really expected her to. He turned back towards the window, not wanting her to see his expression, afraid of emotions he could no longer contain.

"You could have told me," he said quietly. "You should have told me."

"It didn't have anything to do with you."

"Don't give me that!" he snapped and jerked back to face her. "It affects Pen, and that has everything to do with me! We may not be married anymore, but she will always be our daughter. She ties us, Sarah. That's the one bond you can't break, the one asset you can't divide, no matter how much you may want to."

He expelled a slow breath shook his head, feeling the anger within him suddenly extinguished. "I know she's all you have, but I'm not going stand by and watch her tear herself to pieces over this. She's all I have, too."

Sarah swallowed hard. "I didn't realize," she said quietly. "She never said anything, she just seemed to be taking it so well."

"She puts up a good front," Clay mused. "She gets that from you."

"So how is she really doing?"

Clay watched her with dark, unreadable eyes. "She's scared."

She smiled wanly. "That makes two of us."

It actually made three of them, but he did not say it. Instead, he put out his cane and stepped around to the side of the bed. He let his good hand drop down to touch her leg. The limb felt thin and bony beneath the light cotton blanket that covered her. She'd always been slim, but now she was gaunt. If she weighed a hundred pounds he'd be amazed.

"How bad is it really, Sarah?"

She closed her eyes. She shouldn't tell him. He'd acted like a complete ass since he'd walked through the door. He'd made her furious. He'd hurt her. He'd made her feel guilty and insecure and vulnerable, and damn it, those were things she'd vowed she'd never be again. Still, he had come in here in the absolute personification of everything she hated and systematically annihilated every last ounce of her self-respect. The question was: why?

Clay wasn't cruel, at least not intentionally, but then this wasn't really Clay –not even the bitter, resentful Clay she'd lived with those last few years. This was Webb, she realized. Arrogant, cocky, snide, emotionless… she mentally checked off the list of attributes in her head. This was not the man who had been her husband, but rather the one who had been her professional adversary. It had taken her years to discover the difference between the two, but once you knew what to look for, it was easily discerned. Clay was the living, beating heart inside the Tin Man. Webb was the cold, mechanical shell that protected it.

From the moment he'd walked in here, he'd referred to her as Mac. That hadn't been Clay talking. Only Webb had ever called her that. He'd wanted –no, needed—to put distance between them. The question again, was why?

Because he was unsure of himself, she realized. Because he was just as vulnerable to her as she was to him, and because he had come in here with some purpose in which he felt he could not afford to fail. Webb had always been task-oriented. You gave him a mission and he completed it, no matter what the cost. Clay might falter, but Webb never would.

Still, she knew she had scored some direct hits. Webb had faltered, and badly. There were points in time where she had seen the shift in him, where his control had slipped and he had called her Sarah. She had been talking to Clay then, and feeling the gentle touch of his hand upon her knee, she suspected she was talking to Clay now.

"It's not good," she admitted.

His hand tightened upon her knee, squeezing gently and he came closer to her, trailing his fingers along the bed rail. His eyes roved over her face then moved to the monitor and IV at her bedside, and she could see he was silently fitting the pieces together. "You broke your leg in January," he said slowly. "Penny had the bone marrow biopsy done in March." His eyes drilled through her, gray, green, gold and unreadable. "This isn't your first round of chemo, is it?"

She shook her head. It was the smallest of gestures, but it was enough to whiten his knuckles upon the railing. Reaching up, she laid her hand over his, and felt her fingers immediately captured in his desperate grip. She smiled faintly and brushed her thumb across his.

"They finished the first course in the spring and ran the radiation treatments for most of the summer," she said tiredly. "The tests looked good at first, but the cancer was back by the middle of September. They started the next round then."

"And if it doesn't work this time?"

She kept her gaze steady on his. "If it doesn't work this time, then that's it. I won't do another round of chemo, Clay. I can't."

Something broke inside him then, she could see it in his eyes and in the small muscle that jumped on the good side of his face. From here on out she knew, she would only be talking to Clay.

"Let me take you to Switzerland, Sarah." It was a hoarse, whispered plea and she almost gave into it. At the last moment, though, she remembered herself …and him. It was a tempting fantasy, being rescued, but she better than anyone knew that life was never that easy.

"What would Catherine say?" She chided softly.

She saw his momentary confusion as he mentally shifted gears and the trial lawyer she once had been instantly recognized it. Something, she realized, was not adding up. She pulled her hand free of his, her eyes carefully studying him as she plucked at the discordant strand in his story.

"You said that Penny was all you had left," she reminded him, reciting his words back to him with all the precision of a court reporter. "But that's not exactly true. You have Caroline …and Catherine."

He stiffened slowly and pulled his hand from hers. His head and shoulders drew back as he realized the trap he had walked into, but he was caught in a mire of his own making and there was nothing for him to do but admit it.

"I don't have Catherine."

"You said—

"What I said," he said shortly, "was that this doesn't have anything to do with Catherine. It doesn't. There _is_ no Catherine and I. There never was."

"But I thought—

"You thought what everyone else did?" He scowled irritably. "Get real, Sarah. You should know better than to believe everything you read in the papers."

She crossed her arms again, regarding him with patent disbelief. "Maybe not, but a picture's worth a thousand words. I may live here, but that doesn't mean I don't still read the Post. I saw the picture, Clay. It was spread in full color across page ten. You were kissing her."

He acted as if it was some minor, inconsequential thing and perhaps to him it was, but that damned picture had nearly destroyed her. There she'd been, lying on a hospital gurney with a needle in her arm, going through her first round of chemo and scrolling through the online edition of the Post when the name had caught her eye. Curiosity had gotten the better of her and she hadn't been able to help herself. She'd selected the link and been completely blindsided by the image of her husband kissing Catherine Gale.

They had looked good together. Clay's dark, intense energy was perfectly captured in the photograph, animating him even in that moment forever frozen in time. Catherine, by contrast, seemed bright and radiant. Her pale silk gown showed off the elegant curves of her body and her soft blonde hair was cut in style that curled softly about her face. At 5'11, Clay had never been a very tall man, and Sarah even in short heels could easily look him in the eye. Catherine, however, stood a full head shorter than he, and with her soft golden hair and her slim figure draped in the filmy silk gown, she seemed like a pixie in his arms. Sarah's hand had strayed unconsciously then to her own hair. Already thin and brittle from the chemotherapy it was starting to come out in unsightly clumps. She had stared for a very long time at that picture and thought about how beautiful Catherine Gale looked standing there in Clay's arms. It was the kind of beauty that she herself no longer possessed.

She'd felt the sick knot of nausea forming in the pit of her stomach, but it wasn't from the treatment. She had no reason to be jealous, she'd told herself. After all, he wasn't her husband any more. But on some dark, unacknowledged level, she knew that wasn't true. She'd lived with the man for more than twenty years. She'd shared his life, his home and his bed. He was the father of her child. It didn't matter what a piece of paper or the District of Columbia said. It didn't matter what she tried to tell herself. In the dark corners of her heart, he was still her husband. He always would be.

Her eye fell on the tie that peeked from between the lapels of his suit. The vibrant slash of jewel red silk knotted at his throat only served to twist the knife deeper. After all, what woman in her right mind still bought ties for a man she was no longer married to? She supposed it was what she got for going shopping with her daughter with her brain on auto-pilot.

She'd been waiting for Penny to finish agonizing over the selection at the perfume counter when the small table at the edge of the menswear department had caught her eye. She'd missed shopping for a man. It really was more fun than shopping for herself. There was something about sorting through those little scraps of colored material, looking for the one that would best go with his eyes and his hair, with the black suit or the gray, and yet would still compliment all those interesting facets of his personality. It was rather like a sport.

She had plucked the bit of deep red silk from the table without really thinking about it and had made it all the way to the sales counter before she fully registered what she was doing. She'd realized her mistake only after she'd passed both tie and credit card to the sales clerk and looked up to find Penny standing beside her, regarding her with curious eyes.

"Something you want to tell me, Mom? Got a guy on the string?"

For a minute, she had actually considered lying, of fabricating some type of Mr. Wonderful out of thin air, but she knew it wasn't worth it. Sooner or later, she'd have to produce said mystery man, and frankly it was just too much effort. She'd shrugged, signed the credit receipt and then had blithely handed over the tie box with as much nonchalance as she could muster.

"You'll need something for your father. You know how Caroline is about the holidays. If he's really coming out here, she'll end up turning Thanksgiving into Christmas and throw in his birthday, too. You'd better be prepared."

Penny had looked at her as if she'd grown a second head. "You bought a tie for Dad?"

"Consider it my gift to you," she said, glibly. "You know those horrible striped things he wears. You'll thank me for not having to stare at one of them over the dinner table."

"True," Penny had said, and had put the box in her shopping bag with no further comment.

At the time, she'd congratulated herself on her quick thinking. Now she was kicking herself for her transparency. Penny had obviously dressed him for this occasion. She wondered if Clay knew about the tie. Judging from the rather curious way he was staring at her staring at him, she doubted it. Still, it gave her a glimmer of satisfaction to know he would go back to DC and Catherine Gale wearing a tie that she had bought for him. In that small way, at least, he would still be hers.

Something of the her feelings must have shown in her face though, for Clay swore suddenly and rubbed at the back of his neck. It was gesture he frequently used when trying to pull himself off of the hot seat. "It was the Orchid Ball, Sarah. I needed someone to plan the damned thing for me. Catherine offered. I accepted. You know what a nightmare it is to put that event together. You've done it." He scowled. "I'd have kissed Saddam Hussein if he'd offered to take it off my hands."

"If you expect me to believe that was all there is to it, maybe you should have," she retorted.

He controlled his temper with visible effort, shoving his hands deep into his pockets to conceal his clenched fists. "You want to do the whole post-mortem? All right, we can go there. I didn't have a lot of choices. You and Penny were out and Caroline flat out refused. I was complaining to Catherine and Victor that I was going to have to hire it out, and Catherine volunteered."

Sarah recalled the endless rounds of tedious decisions that only bored, rich women could possibly enjoy making. Catherine frankly didn't seem the type. "Why in God's name would she do that?"

Clay shrugged. "How should I know? She'd just retired from the Company. She was planning on spending some time with her son, but Kevin had just accepted a LEGAT posting to Europe. She said she was at loose ends and needed a distraction."

She looked him up and down taking in the immaculate suit, his neatly trimmed hair and manicured appearance. He wasn't the man he used to be, but who was? The fact remained that he was wealthy, powerful, intelligent and still relatively good-looking. By Washington standards, he was still a catch and Catherine would have been a fool to pass up such an opportunity. She'd been to court with Catherine --twice. Catherine Gale was no fool. By the same token, Clay might not be getting any younger, but he wasn't dead, either.

"I'm sure you were more than happy to distract, her," she replied, sarcasm dripping from her voice.

He glared at her. "You don't believe me? Ask Galindez, he was there. Oh, wait, I forgot. You can't do that. You've got him in the deep freeze, too."

She threw him an acid look. "He does seem to have a habit of coveringing for you," she said dryly. "Can you blame me?"

He said nothing at first, and there was something in that silence that bit more deeply than any words he might have spoken. He did blame her, she realized, though he had never said as much. Perhaps, she thought wearily, it was time that he finally did. She was tired of this one-sided battle of words and silence. Leaning back into her pillows, she returned his accusing gaze with her steady silence.

Clay had rarely been one to speak his feelings. Rather, he preferred to demonstrate them in subtle and sometimes, not-so-subtle gestures. It was a method of warfare that she frankly found exhausting. She was trial lawyer, for God's sake. She was a Marine. She knew sixteen ways to kill a man and a dozen more to maim him. She could fight with laws and words and cold hard reason, but she had never learned how to fight with silence. Only Clay knew how to do that.

This time though, there was a difference. Time, short as it was, was on her side. He was the one who had demanded this audience. He was the one who had come seeking resolution, and if he really wanted it, then damn it, he was going to have to talk to her. He was going to have to make the first move because frankly he was the one who had it all to lose. Regrets were for the living, not the dead. She felt more of them slipping away with every day that passed her by. Soon, she suspected, she would have no regrets at all.

She allowed her eyes to drift closed, suddenly not caring what he did. Two could play the waiting game, she thought wearily, and this time it was a game she knew she could win.

He shifted irritably in the silence, drawing further away from the bed, and she heard the bitter note in his voice as he spoke. "You're not angry with Victor because he covered for me."

She smiled faintly. "No? Tell me then, why am I angry?"

"You're angry because he violated the code."

She thought about this for a moment, and nodded slowly. "That's part of it," she said quietly. "It's the first thing they drill into you at boot camp: never leave a man behind –no matter what." She shook her head slowly. "It's the one thing I could never understand, the one thing that makes me wonder if I ever really knew him at all. The Victor Galindez I thought I knew was a Marine through and through. So how could he do what he did? How could he trade a brotherhood that would never abandon one of their own for an organization that throws their own people to the wolves at the first sign of trouble? How can he live like that? –How can anyone?"

"We can't," Clay said softly, "not forever, but that's not what you're really asking, is it? That's not what you really want to know.

"What you really want to know," he continued, "is how he could leave Harm behind to die. You want to know how he could live with that."

There was infinite sadness in his expression, mixed with unwavering certainty, and for the first time tonight –perhaps for the first time in many years—she thought she might be seeing the real Clayton Webb, stripped of all pretenses, with the mirrors shattered and the smoke blown away. He looked tired --as tired as she felt-- and in his own way, just as fragile.

"That's what you can't forgive him for, Sarah" he said softly, and God knows if you can't forgive Victor, you'll never forgive me."


	5. Chapter 5: Rupture Zone

**Part V: Rupture Zone**

There, Clay thought grimly, he'd finally said it. He watched the myriad of emotions that crossed her face as he spoke this simple truth. Denial wasn't among them. In that instant, he understood that he had lost. He had probably lost before he had even started, he realized morosely. It had just taken him all these years to finally accept it. She didn't want to be with him. She'd wanted to be with Harm. And soon, in a few days or weeks or months, she would be. He had just… hoped.

He tightened his grip on the cane, suddenly desperate to be away from here, away from her. "Look," he said brusquely, "This was a mistake. I—

He shook his head and managed a ragged breath. "Do what you want," he said tersely, and then paused. "Just… be careful of Pen. I don't know how much more she can take."

He certainly couldn't take any more. Drawing himself together, he set his course for the open doorway and escape.

"You're wrong." The words, soft but clearly spoken struck him squarely between the shoulder blades. Against his will and his better judgment, he found himself slowing, stopping, half-turning to look back at her.

"Am I?" His voice sounded hoarse and raspy to his own ears.

The dim glow of the overhead lights made her seem little more than a wraithlike shadow in the bed and he nearly missed her small, almost imperceptible nod. He risked a step towards her, and then another and another until he had reclaimed nearly all of the ground he had conceded.

"You are," she said quietly. "I don't blame you for Harm dying. You blame yourself enough for that. You shouldn't. It wasn't your fault."

He gazed down at her, his face impassive.

"Wasn't it?"

"No," she said, and reached out to snag at his sleeve, drawing him closer. She slid her fingers down the finely woven wool of his suit jacket and circled her fingers about his wrist, taking hold of his good hand. His fingers felt wooden in hers. She tightened her grip, squeezing gently, and willed him to meet her eyes.

"You couldn't control what happened, Clay. I know that."

He darted her a small, disbelieving glance. "Do you? –You weren't there, Sarah."

She sighed. "No, but I've been there. You think you're the only one ever to get caught up in a Harmon Rabb whirlwind?" She shook her head. "It's just the way that he was," she said quietly. "Harm made his own decisions. He did what he thought was right and damn the consequences for the rest of us."

She shifted slightly in the bed, trying to find a better position. Her recumbent pose put her at somewhat of a disadvantage for this type of debate. She was surprised when he reached for her, dropping his cane over the edge of the bed rail and pulling her gently towards him to prop the pillows up behind her. There was something in the gesture, an old familiar intimacy that tore at her, for it was mixed with the same silent awkwardness with which she had once cared for him. He stepped back then, his expression guarded, but his eyes burned with an intensity that told her he was finally listening.

"I never blamed you for Harm's death," she said, willing her tone to remain even. "I never blamed Victor for it, either."

"And yet you never managed to tell us that," he observed.

She sighed deeply. "—Because I was furious with both of you. You should have told me. More importantly, you should have told Sergei, but you didn't. You buried it. You buried a lie in a grave with Harm's name on it and you buried the truth in a mound of Agency red tape. After all those years he spent looking for his father? After all the years you've wondered what happened to yours? Harm deserved better than that, and you know it!"

"Of course he deserved better!" Clay snapped. "Everyone does. There's a wall full of stars at Langley, every one of them for a man who deserved better, but that doesn't mean I can give it!" He sighed heavily and she heard the barely suppressed frustration in his voice when he spoke. "For God's sake, Sarah, I gave you the best I could."

"Is that what you tell yourself?" she challenged, taking in his tense defensive posture and reflecting it back at him. Frankly, she thought it was crap. Perhaps for a lot of Harm's friends it sufficed, but when it came to Sergei and Mattie… no. It wasn't enough. Not by a long shot.

"It's what I know," he said firmly, and she couldn't argue with him. He did know, perhaps as well as anyone could. Neville Webb had deserved better, too, but all his family had ever seen for it was one of those stars on the Langley wall.

Save for the silver-framed 8x10 that had graced Porter's mantle, and an occasional reference made, she had little knowledge of Clay's father. Still, the faded suggestion of the man had always lingered in the shadowy corners of her mother-in-law's tastefully decorated rooms, small flashes of him surfacing in the mundane interactions between mother and son, as if Clay were merely filling a role intended for another.

She supposed what he had done made sense in a way. In his own pragmatic way of thinking, the story he had created surrounding Harm's death had been meant to heal rather than hurt. He had only been trying to give Sergei and Mattie the closure forever denied to his own family. In his mind, the elaborate charade might well have been the best that he could manage, but was it really? Was it enough? Perhaps it might have been for others, but not for her.

"I needed more than just closure, Clay. I needed the truth."

He shook his head. "Damn it! I couldn't tell you the truth! I couldn't tell anyone!"

"Maybe not when it happened," she countered. "But you could have told me later. You _should _have told me later. If you had, I might have accepted it, but you didn't tell me. --You had no intention of ever telling me!"

He didn't deny it, and his silent assent tore another little wound in her soul. "You didn't trust me, Clay," she said quietly, "so how could you have expected me to trust you?"

He barked a sharp, angry laugh. "My God, did you even hear what you just said? You're not angry because I didn't tell Sergei the truth about Harm, you're pissed because I didn't tell _you._ –Not that I'm surprised. It was always that way between the two of you. The rest of us didn't matter."

"You've always mattered." It was meant for assurance, but she heard the note of guilt in her own voice, and knew how false it sounded.

He shook his head, his expression bleak. "Not enough," he said. His eyes were level upon hers and filled with a pain she had rarely seen. "How do you think it feels, Sarah?" he said hoarsely. "—Living with you all those years, knowing that I was the man you were married to and he…"

He trailed off, and for a long moment she wondered if he was actually going to have the nerve to say it.

"He was the one that you loved."

She accepted the accusation unflinchingly, taking it for the truth that it was and in turn tossing out another.

"I loved both of you," she said quietly, "and both of you paid for it." She hesitated, taking in his stricken features and the misery that seemed to radiate off of him. "But I think maybe you paid the most."

He snorted. "That's because you can't have it both ways. Sooner or later, you have to choose."

"Yeah, well, you didn't exactly give me the chance to do that, did you?"

"I gave you twenty years of chances, sweetheart," he said dryly, "and you've been choosing all along." The color of his eyes seemed to shift a little, going from murky green to cold flint as he stepped closer to the bed, bearing down on her in his anger. "You've chosen every single day. You chose it when Harm died. You chose it that day at Arlington when I told you what really happened and you chose the day you left." He let gaze, cold and cruel run down along the lines of her thin and wasted body.

"You're choosing right now," he murmured, "the least you could do is have common decency to admit it."

"Admit what?"

He stared at her for a long moment, his expression so flat and unreadable that it sliced her heart more deeply the cool monotone of his words.

"If it was Harm standing here instead of me? –You'd already be in Switzerland."

She blanched white as the implication sunk in. "That's not true," she whispered.

He shook head, a small derisive smile pulling at the good side of his mouth. "And you call me a liar."

She let the silence fall between them as she absorbed the truth in his words. Certainly he believed it was true, and from a certain perspective, she supposed that it was. She forced herself to look at this from his point of view. She and Harm had spent ten long years dancing around each other, never quite connecting, but never letting go. Clay was no fool, he'd seen their snare long before he had stepped into the middle of it, and she often wondered what it was that had caused him to go against both his logic and better judgment to be with her. But, for some unfathomable reason, he had, and in spite of all the improbabilities, they had managed to build this life together. Maybe a good part of it had been illusion, misunderstanding and pretense, but if it had, it had been so good that it had taken her years to know the difference. Clay was, after all, a master of deception. It seemed that in the end, he was so good at it that he was capable of deceiving even himself.

But had she deceived him? Had she really married him and built a life with him all the while clinging to the memory of Harm? She hadn't thought so at the time, and yet she could not deny that Harm had been an integral part of her life. Her experiences with Harmon Rabb had shaped and molded her as an adult, and had had a lot to do with making her the woman she had become. She'd never be able to cut that part of him from her soul, nor would she want to, for without him and her memories of him, she would not be who she was now. He had been both her adversary and her sounding board and ultimately the measuring stick against which she judged both her honor and integrity. But how could she make Clay understand that? How could she show him what Harm had meant to her without him assuming that it was not yet another choice in which Harm prevailed?

She looked down at her hands, clenched tightly in her lap. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"I want you to admit the truth, Sarah," he persisted. "For once in your adult life, I want you to get down off the damned fence and make a decision."

She studied him bleakly. "Does it even matter any more?"

He nodded decisively. "Yes."

"Why?"

He seemed to consider this for a moment. "Because you owe it to me," he said at last. "We were married twenty years. I think I deserve to know how much of it was real."

"You idiot." The words were tired and flat because she just didn't have the energy to be angry any more. "How many kinds of hell have we been through together? My God, Clay, you've seen me with a knife to my throat and I've seen you tortured half to death. Wasn't that real enough for you? You held me together when I lost our baby. I held my hand over the hole in your chest when you got shot in Turkey and damned near died on me. How many times did we almost lose each other?"

"A few," he admitted.

"But we always came back. We _fought _to make it back. It wasn't easy being with you, and it wasn't always fun or exciting or romantic, but damn it, Clay, it was a life. It was _our _life, and every minute of it was real. When the hell did you decide that it wasn't?"

"The day I told you what really happened to Harm." He shook his head. "The way you looked at me, like you regretted the day you met me… I knew then."

She shook her head. "No," she said bitterly. "It was long before that. You made that decision the day Harm died. You couldn't live with the choice you made, so you convinced yourself that I would have made a different one."

She saw the subtle stillness that descended over him, saw the fine tightening of his features and knew that she had struck a painful nerve. She tilted her head, her steady gaze holding neither sympathy nor recrimination as she spoke.

"You left him there," she said quietly. Her tone was that of the Marine, the soldier, the JAG court judge she once had been, rather than his wife, or Harm's friend, and though the words were cold, it was not with anger, or hatred, but simple fact that no one could deny. "You left him there in that miserable little hell, and he died for you. You created that grand illusion of giving him a hero's funeral at Arlington with all the military polish you could muster, because the truth was that you left him in an unmarked grave half a world away. Then, when it was all over, you tried to walk back to your perfect life as if nothing had ever happened. But it did happen, and you knew it, and you had to live with it. You couldn't change it. You couldn't take it back. You couldn't even begin to repay the sacrifice he made for you."

It was the fact that he didn't flinch, that he merely stood there, his jaw clenched and his face too still, which told her she had accurately interpreted his own self loathing.

"And you wish he'd never made it at all," he said grimly.

"No," she replied. "You do."

She shook her head, amazed that it had taken her so long to see it. Hadn't he once told her that she was his conscience? --The voice in his head that kept him straight, reminding him of right from wrong? Perhaps there was more truth to it than either one of them had realized, but instead of serving to bind them together, it had somehow managed to tear them apart.

"You really believe it, don't you?" she said quietly. "You really think that if I'd been there, if it had been up to me, I would have chosen him."

His silence was all the answer she needed, and yet it was not enough. Taking hold of the bedrail, she pulled herself upright, then pushed the release button, sliding the railing down so that she could swing her feet to the floor. Bracing her hands against the mattress, she held herself upright with supreme effort and leveled her gaze upon his.

"Do you want to know the truth, Clay? Do you really want to know?"

She could see in his eyes that he didn't, that he was afraid of the answer, but he didn't flinch. He didn't speak. He didn't move. He simply stood there, paralyzed, just at the edge of her reach, and she knew that she had to release him, release both of them from the ghost that had haunted them for so long.

"If I had been there, in that cell, in that room, choosing which one of you would live and which one would die? –I would have chosen you."

He started to shake then, the faintest tremble that chased up his arms and across his shoulders setting his head into a small swaying motion of denial.

"No," he whispered. The word was little more than a harsh breath.

"Yes," she said firmly.

"You loved him."

"Yeah," she said again. "I loved him, once upon a time. He was my friend and my partner and my ideal of honor and integrity and everything a good person should be." She felt the thin stream of tears trickling down her cheek and knew it would no good to brush them away. Instead she mustered a small smile to go with them. "He was my hero," she said softly. "Maybe he was yours, too."

"You loved him," Clay said again, and started to back away from her as if he sensed the fearful truth she was about to unleash upon him.

She reached out and snatched his sleeve, her thin fingers closing tightly about his wrist in a grip that was surprisingly strong.

"But I loved you more! Damn it, Clay! How is it that you could never see that? I didn't marry Harm. I married you. I _chose_ you. I chose you in Paraguay, and then I wasn't brave enough to stick with it. But I chose you in Iraq, I chose you on the day we married, and I chose you every single day after that." She shook him fiercely, pulling him towards her, willing him to understand, to believe. "That's what love is Clay. It's a choice, but you have to choose it every day. Marriage is the promise that you will."

She slid her hand down, folding it over his white knuckled grip on the cane, then reached out with her other, seeking his good hand and tightening her fingers about his, willing him to look at her.

"You know I keep my promises," she said quietly.

He said nothing, merely looked at her, and in the tortured hazel depths of his eyes, she could almost see that place, see that wretched little room where a single choice had changed the course of their lives. It couldn't be changed back, but it could be understood and accepted, and maybe even forgiven if he would allow it.

"We're not married," he reminded her, his voice dull.

"No," she said sadly, "we're not, but do you know why, Clay? Do you understand why?"

He shook his head slightly, and she wasn't surprised that he didn't get it. Twenty years of misunderstanding didn't just vanish in twenty minutes, and he'd never been that good with people except, perhaps, to know when they were lying.

She stroked her thumbs across the backs of his hands and felt the fresh wave of tears as they slid down her cheeks. "I ache for what happened to Harm, but that isn't why I left you. It's not even why I was angry. I was angry because you went through all of that and you didn't tell me. You didn't let me choose. You decided for me, if only in your own mind. You took away my choice, Clay, and if I couldn't choose, then I couldn't keep the promise. Why did you do, it Clay? Why didn't you trust me?"

"Because you never let him go." His response was so quick, so automatic, that she instantly knew it as a resentment he had harbored for years. He jerked his hands free of hers in a small, angry gesture. "Don't even try to deny it, Sarah," he said wearily. "I did –for too long. But the day I got off that plane from Korea, all I had to do was take one look at your face, and I knew you'd already heard. You looked like somebody had cut away a part of your soul."

_Somebody had,_ she thought bleakly, but she didn't dare tell him that. –She didn't dare deny it, either. But how could she explain? How could she make him see that she'd stood there, that day, grieving a small but important part of her heart, and yet been so damned grateful that the larger part of it had returned to her, standing before her safe and sound, when she'd feared she'd lost it all?

She expelled a slow breath and prayed for the right words, words that could properly explain what Harm had meant to her –and why Clay had meant so much more.

"You're right about me not letting go of Harm, but you're wrong about the reason. He was an important part of my life. Like it or not, the time I spent with him shaped me, helped to make me the person I became. In that sense, he will always be a part of who I am, but you…" She shook her head. "Damn it, Clay! How could you doubt me? --Doubt us? After all those years, how could you still not know how much I loved you?"

"Why?"

The word was so softly uttered that for a moment she wasn't even sure he'd actually asked it, but she could see the intensity of it burning in his eyes.

"What?"

He swallowed and raised chin slightly in both challenge and defiance as he spoke. "Why did you love me? Why me instead of him?"

She stared at him, dumbfounded. God, he really didn't know! It was something so deep, so instinctual that she wasn't sure she could put it into words –had never thought she needed to. Hadn't he felt it? Didn't he understand? Had he really never sensed that connection, so deep and intuitive that it sometimes frightened her? Had he truly never felt that dark energy that had whirled and crackled between them, alternately drawing them together and pushing them apart like supercharged particles in an ion storm?

Maybe he hadn't. Or perhaps he had, but in that cold, careful, analytical way of his, he had been afraid to trust it. Now it seemed she must find some way to explain it to him, for Clay believed nothing, trusted nothing without proof. –Not even her.

She sighed. "You're not an easy man to love, Clayton Webb. Some days you're not even an easy man to like, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible."

"You always did like a challenge," he said grimly, but he must have sensed the truth in her words, for he didn't try to pull away.

"Do you remember," she began, almost hesitantly, "that moment, in Afghanistan, in the prison camp, right before you told the guards to put their weapons down?"

He nodded slowly. He would never forget it. Time had slowed, stretching infinitely between heartbeats, and he'd feared every one of them might be her last.

"You looked at me," she said simply, "and it was like a key turning in a lock. That whole time you never took your eyes off mine and there was this…" she paused, casting about for a word.

"Adrenaline," he said practically.

She shook her head. "No, it was more that. It was a sort of electricity, a connection. It was like I could see myself standing there with that knife to my throat. I couldn't see you what you were seeing, but I could feel it. The guy had a good grip on me and the knife was pinching my skin. I couldn't feel him relax, but you could see it, and the instant you did, I _knew._ I've never felt that with anyone, not even Harm."

He shrugged. "It was an intense situation Sarah. We've had our share of them. You haven't always read me that well."

She shook her head. "No. That's what made you interesting. You were like a Chinese puzzle box. Every time I'd think I'd solved you, that I'd found the answer to the riddle, you'd just present me with another one. I wanted to see every side of you, know all the secrets, uncover all the layers. I don't think you ever did show them all to me."

"You saw more than most," he admitted.

"I wanted to see it all."

His hazel eyes seemed to pierce her, more green now than gold, with cold little threads of silver flashing through. "If I'd shown it to you, would you have stayed? Or would you have walked away once you had the answer?"

She conceded the point with only the smallest flicker of expression. She did have a habit of doing just that. It was an ugly pattern that had repeated itself over and over again with Chris, John, Dalton, Mic… and ultimately even Harm. Only Clay had presented her with the ultimate challenge, the never-ending riddle that left her wanting an answer, needing another, and always coming back for more.

She'd walked away from him once, foolish enough think she'd finally learned all there was to know of him, that like all the other men in her life, he'd misjudged and underestimated her. She'd left him that day on the terrace at Manderley, feeling secure in her victory, but even then the tiny tendrils of doubt had clawed at her, whispering that she hadn't really won. There had been just a little too much truth in his words when he'd told her he'd chosen her because she was tough and didn't need much. Hadn't she torn her way through almost every intimate relationship she'd ever had with a man trying to prove exactly that? In spite of it all, what she'd told Harm and Dr. McCool and even tried to tell herself, she'd always had the sneaking suspicion that when it came to her relationship with Clayton Webb, she hadn't even scratched the surface of the man. And when she next encountered him, a year and a half later in the war ravaged heart of Iraq where neither one of them were supposed to be, her suspicion became certainty.

There had been a wild, reckless edge to him that she had never seen before. The man once so concerned with policy and the subtle nuances of political negotiation, suddenly didn't seem to give a damn about what anyone thought, including and especially his superiors. Where once she and Harm had had to cajole him into an occasional bending of the rules, he now seemed grimly determined to smash them to bits. If anyone held any sway with him at all in that time and place, it had been Victor Galindez, and even then, it hadn't been much –barely been enough to keep them alive. Why Victor had stuck with him, she would never know, but for some unknown reason, he had decided to back a man who no longer seemed to care about anything, least of all himself.

The cool, calm and immaculate spy she remembered had somehow morphed into a rumpled, dirty and disheveled operative with hair worn just a little too long at the collar and an almost perpetual stubble of beard. The irritable wit that had been his trademark had vanished into sullen anger. There hadn't been so much as a single droll observation to break the chasms of silence that had become his habit. If the man she had known before had been Clay, this was the anti-Clay, a churning mass of black energy that had drawn her back to him like a moth to flame.

She hadn't been looking to save him. If anything, she'd been looking to save the Gunny, but there had been something in this new, damned incarnation of Webb that had fascinated her. In spite of all his anger, all his best attempts to rebuff her, she'd found herself coming to back to him again and again looking for some small fragment of that other man she had known. At first, the only thing she recognized, the only part of him that was familiar was the pain. That raw, wounded part of his soul that Saddik had rent open in Paraguay, that she had come to know so well in their months together, that had healed a bit only to have her tear it open again with her leaving, had finally scarred over, but underneath it the ache was still there.

As if reading her mind, sensing the shadowy path of memory her thoughts had taken, he fixed her again with his pointed gaze.

"Why did you come back to me?"

She ground her teeth in frustration. She thought she had been explaining precisely that, but apparently she still wasn't getting though. "What do you want, Clay? What is it you're looking for? A defining moment, when I knew I had to be with you and nobody else?"

"Yes."

--God, he was impossible! There had been so many things, so many experiences, so many exchanges of emotional give and take that had transpired between them through the years. How could he expect her to pick only one?

An then it rose to her unbidden: the memory of a dusty stretch of shattered highway on the road from Samarra to Tikrit, with the sun breaking over the distant horizon, and smell of blood and cordite clinging to her clothes…

The heavy beat of the chopper blades whipped her hair, pulling it loose from the band she'd secured it with and pelting her with small, stinging grains of sand. She'd watched as Vukovic helped the Marine medics load Galindez into the helicopter, taking care not to jar him, or tangle the IV lines running into his arm. Then she'd turned to look at Webb. There had been something in his eyes –in his face—she'd never seen before, not in all his incarnations. Even so, it was something familiar, something she recognized, something of the man she remembered he once had been. With a flash of perfect clarity, she knew what he was about to do.

"You're going after him," she said, her voice barely audible over the din of the helicopter.

He didn't deny it. His eyes scanned her slowly, as if memorizing every detail, then shifted to something cold and hard and shuttered. "The chopper's waiting, Mac."

She looked around. "Who's going with you?"

He didn't answer. He didn't need to.

"Damn it!" she hissed, "You can't go in there alone!"

He shrugged. "It's a straightforward run. It'll be like shooting fish in a barrel."

"Yeah, except you'll be the fish," she'd snapped. "Come with us Clay, we'll get a Force Recon team to back you."

He shook his head. "He doesn't have that long."

"Neither will you if you try going in there by yourself," she'd retorted.

"That's my problem. Not yours." He jerked his head sharply, indicating the waiting Marines. "Get on the chopper, Mac. Give my regards to Rabb. Enjoy your honeymoon. Have a nice life." He shot glance to the group of men that waited in the open door of the helicopter. "Vukovic can finish wrapping things up."

His gaze turned back to her and he paused, his eyes flat, his tone deliberate. "There's nothing left for you here."

He turned away then, heading back towards the bullet-scarred Humvee, and she'd felt the anger and frustration welling up inside her. It had taken everything she had not to scream at him.

"Why are you doing this? Why is this man worth dying for?"

The question had brought him short and he'd paused for a moment with his hand on the door handle.

"Better men have died for less." He shrugged. "--Besides, if Galindez doesn't make it?" he let the words rise to a question, his eyes darting away to the far horizon as the possibility hung between them. "Black's the only one left who would return the favor."

She'd stood there a moment longer, not ready to concede this battle of wills.

"Go on Mac," he said, his voice almost gentle. "Go back to Harm. It's where you belong."

She knew he was right. She could suddenly feel the weight of the ring on her hand, the diamond twisted slightly into her palm, the stone burning her with the reminder of a ten-year investment with a pay off that was now only a chopper ride, an airplane flight and sixteen hours away. Slowly, she'd turned and headed back towards the helo, her feet picking up speed as she went.

She made it to the open door and Vukovic reached out to offer her a hand. She was never sure who was more surprised –him or her—when she snatched Galindez's rifle from his shoulder.

"Colonel!" He protested, but she cut him off. She could hear the grinding of the starter as the battered engine coughed to life behind them, and she knew there was no time to waste.

"Tell Harm I'm sorry," she said. "I'll call him when I can." Then she was turning around, racing back to the Humvee that Clay had already jammed into gear.

She reached out, caught a hand hold on the vehicle and pulled herself up onto the running board, yanked open the passenger door and climbed into the seat beside him. He'd slammed on the brakes so hard that it nearly threw her into the windshield.

Webb turned on her then, his face a study of perfect rage. "God damn it, Mac!" he'd shouted, slamming the steering wheel with his fist. "Get out! Get the hell out!"

It was only in that instant that she was certain he meant it, that he hadn't been trying to play her. What was it he always used to say? –A good operative never fights a battle he can get someone else to take for him? Apparently, he wasn't as good as he used to be. He really meant to do this alone. He wasn't stupid. He knew his chances. He wasn't planning on coming back. She let it filter through her mind, the thought of Clayton Webb being dead, really dead, with no possibility of him just being out there, lurking in the shadows, playing his games, of knowing for certain he would never cross her path again.

_No._

--Every fiber of her being rebelled at the thought. No, even if she never laid eyes on him again, he had to be out there somewhere, watching, waiting, doing the dark, secret things that he did. Somewhere in the last ten years it had become part of the order of her world. She would not have it any other way.

"If you won't come with us, then I'm going with you," she said.

Something flashed in his eyes, something dark and ugly that he didn't bother to repress. "Damn you!" he hissed, "Don't you get it? --I don't want you here!"

"I know you don't," she said flatly, settling back into the seat and taking a firm grip on the rifle. "But you need me, Webb …and I need you."

The heavy pounding of the helicopter seemed to fade, the gritty dust swirled less fiercely and they looked out to see the Marine helo retracting its landing gear and lifting up and away from them. Webb swore savagely, uttering blunt, filthy epithets that she'd never thought to hear cross his lips. Then he turned back to her, black emotion churning in his eyes. It was a roiling, jumbled combination of fury and despair and… fear?

For a single moment she thought he might strike her –or kiss her. Instead, he simply looked at her and it was then that she felt it: the dark energy, the turning of the key in the lock, the silent acceptance and seamless merging of two minds into one. Then, with one foot on the clutch and the other on the gas, he reached for the gearshift and sent them lurching down the road to hell together.

"Samarra," she whispered, her mouth so dry that for a moment she thought she could still taste the dust on her teeth. "It was Samarra."


	6. Chapter 6: Magnitude

**Part VI: Magnitude**

Samarra. The instant the word fell from her lips, soft and exotic, he was transported back to that hellish stretch of earth. Had she picked any other place, any other time, he might have turned on his heel and left her there, walked out of her life as hard and fast as she'd once walked out of his, without so much as a second thought or backwards glance. He could have made it down the corridor, he told himself. Maybe even to the elevator and his rented car, back to the airport and the private jet. He could have returned to his empty life, secure in the knowledge that he had been right, and after thirty tangled, tumultuous years, he might have finally been able to let her go. But, damn her, of all the times they'd shared together, she had to pick that one, and he couldn't debate the point. If ever there had been a defining moment, a fork in the road, a bridge crossed and burnt behind them, --that had been the one.

"You wouldn't go," he said.

"No," she agreed. "But you did everything in your power to make me."

He shrugged, trying to affect an air of nonchalance and wondering how miserably he was failing. "That was how the story was supposed to end, wasn't it?"

"With you getting yourself killed?"

He shook his head. "--With me doing the right thing."

"You were sending me back to marry Harm."

"I was giving you what I thought you wanted."

She scowled. "Like hell! You were pushing me away because you were afraid to take what you wanted for yourself!"

"Maybe I had reason to be afraid," he said quietly.

She hesitated, and he knew she was remembering that other time and place, that derelict shadow of a man he had been. "Maybe you did," she admitted, and he could almost see the progression of thoughts as they chased behind her eyes: If things had been different…

If she hadn't won the coin toss and gone to London with Harm…

If Harm hadn't been called back into the Navy when he'd tried to resign his commission…

If she hadn't accepted that TDA to Iraq to replace Owen Sebring…

If she had gotten on that chopper…

"I never would have seen you again, would I?" she said quietly.

He shook his head, and felt the silence pressing against him, an old and heavy weight that he was tired of carrying.

"You could have let me go," he said grimly. "Why didn't you?"

"You needed me," she said, her words a soft echo of the ones she had shouted at him so long ago, "and I needed you."

He felt the weariness descending over him. There was a time when he had believed her, but that had been a different time and place, and now he simply couldn't be sure. Had he believed her because it was true? Or because he'd simply wanted to believe? And what about her? Had she meant it? Or was it simply another case of Sarah deluding herself because she didn't want to admit the truth?

"Are you sure about that?" He felt the words roll from his tongue before he could call them back.  
"What?"  
The hell with it, he thought grimly. He had nothing left to lose here, he'd already lost it all. He might as well go all in. Clenching the handle of the cane tightly in his grip, he took a step closer to the bed.

"Was it really me you needed? –Or did you just need the excuse?"

She paled at his words; she might have raged back at him had the question not been so quiet, so sincere.

"He wouldn't be the first man you've run from," he murmured. "You ran from me, your husband, your father…" He shook his head. "It's a pattern with you Sarah; you have to beat us to the punch. You have to leave us so we can't leave you."

"That argument would play better," she said sardonically, "If we hadn't been married for twenty years."

He shrugged. "Twenty years or two, it doesn't change the fact that you left."

She drew a ragged breath. So here it was: the final act. They weren't talking about the distant past anymore. She closed her eyes, fighting back that old familiar pain that both felt keenly but neither really understood.

"You left me long before that," she replied. She saw the question in his gaze and met it with her own, brown and unwavering one. "The way things were those last few months? –I didn't think you wanted me to stay."

A small muscle ticked in his jaw. "I didn't," he said tersely. "I didn't want your pity. –Not any more than you want mine."

"It wasn't pity." There was emptiness in her words that she couldn't quite disguise, and he seized upon it with the ferocity of a trial lawyer.

"Wasn't it?" He stared down at her, his eyes cold and glittering. "Six months, Sarah. Six months and you didn't even try to talk to me."

"Clay—

He silenced her with a single, quelling look as he continued his slow, predatory advance upon the bed. "You wouldn't go to counseling." He said savagely. "You moved out of our bedroom. You barely even acknowledged my existence, and then suddenly I wake up flat on my back in a hospital bed and find you hovering over me like some twisted version of a Stepford wife. What was I supposed to think? That you just flipped some switch and suddenly loved me again? That you weren't angry anymore? –That's too sharp a u-turn, even for you."

"Of course I was angry," she grated. "–I'd have been an idiot not to be! Everything I'd thought I knew about you, everything I thought I knew about _us_ I suddenly learn is a charade, and something you never trusted! And then I find out you're hiding things from me? Not telling me how sick you are? Not telling me you're heart is a goddamned ticking time bomb ready to explode? You play all these stupid games with your life like it doesn't matter? --Like Penny and I don't matter? My God, Clay, I was beyond angry, I was _furious_ with you!"

"So what happened?" he asked, determined not to let her stray from the issue.

She shrugged. It was a small gesture, just the faintest lifting of one thin shoulder.

"I ran out of time to be angry," she said quietly.

_Kresge Medical Center_

_Pimmit Hills, VA_

_5 years earlier..._

He had been so quiet, so still, that she had been afraid to touch him at first. She'd sat in the vinyl recliner beside the bed, hands resting lightly on the thinly padded arms, and simply watched him breathe.

_Breathe, damn it. Breathe._

She watched each shallow rise and fall of his chest, heard the faint hissing noise of the respirator as it pumped each carefully measured burst into his lungs. She listened to the faint beep of the monitors, measuring heartbeat and respiration and countless other vitals. Closing her eyes, she tried to lose herself in the soft electronic symphony that danced to the unsteady rhythms of life. If she focused on that, on the hiss and hum of the respirator, of the faint beep of the monitor, then maybe she could forget the jangling, discordant, loathsome words of the doctors buzzing through her mind.

_"I'm sorry Mrs. Webb… complications during the procedure… massive stroke… complete paralysis to the left side of his body… next few hours… touch and go… if he makes it through until morning…"_

If, she thought bleakly, it was such a small word to hang a life upon.

She rose quietly from the chair and came to stand beside him. His skin was gray and colorless, and for a moment she did not want to touch him for fear that she would find the machines had lied, that his body would be cold and stiff beneath her fingers. When she finally dared to lay her hand upon his, she found his fingers cool and dry, but not with the unnatural stillness of death. She pulled the thin hospital blanket more closely about him, covering his hands and arms in an attempt to warm them from the eternal chill.

For a long moment, she simply looked at him, taking in every detail of the face she had looked upon for so long. Had she ever really known him? There was a time she would have thought so, would have thought that she knew him better than anyone, known his thoughts, his feelings, the convoluted pathways of logic that incredibly brilliant and twisted mind could travel. It was only now, in these last few hours, that she'd come to understand the truth: she'd only known what he'd allowed her to see.

She supposed she shouldn't be surprised. Clay had always been a control freak. People, power, information, emotion –Clayton Webb was a maestro of situational control, organizing and orchestrating a hundred little details to bring about the outcomes he desired. Even when it blew up in his face, when it all went to hell, he never lost control. He simply continued on through the shadows, pushing buttons and pulling strings until at last his mission was complete.

Ironic then that if he lived through this night, he would come through it stripped of the one thing upon which he had always relied. The doctors had been brutally frank in their assessment. Complete paralysis to the left side of his body. Large motor skills might be recovered with intensive therapy and treatment. Fine motor skills were completely destroyed. Damage to the speech centers of his brain meant that any words he uttered would not just be distorted and incoherent, but possibly scrambled and meaningless. He might talk again of course, but it would take months of speech therapy, months of grueling work to train new pathways through his damaged brain, re-learning every simple act as if he were a child.

And that was just the physical damage. There was no way to assess the rest of it, though they had tried to warn her. Personality changes were common: irrational anger, depression, sudden, unpredictable shifts of mood, any or all of the above were to be expected in such a situation. She was not to take any emotional outbursts to heart. The brain had suffered severe trauma. It wouldn't really be him talking. It wouldn't really be him at all. He simply would not be able to control it.

And there, she thought, lay the final, tragic note. This man who lay before her had advised Presidents, had influenced ambassadors and foreign heads of state. He'd controlled money and power and information and arguably the acts of nations. He'd started wars and he had stopped them. He had helped to manipulate –in his own subtle and untraceable way—the very course of history. He had gone into that operating room the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a man in control of one of the most powerful espionage organizations in the world. Tomorrow, when he woke --if he woke-- he would find himself completely helpless, a man unable to control anything, including his own body.

There was something wrong with his face, she realized, a slackening of his features, a looseness about his lips and the left side of his mouth. It must be the paralysis. She stroked a hand along his jaw and felt her fingers come away damp and sticky with saliva. A small thin drip of spittle trailed at the corner of his mouth where it sagged, and would not seem to close properly. She frowned as she stared down at him. He would hate that. With brisk, efficient movements, she plucked a tissue from a box on the bedside table and wiped at the corner of his mouth until it was dry. Pressing her fingers against his lips, she molded the malleable flesh, trying to sculpt his features into the more natural shape she remembered. She was only partly successful. Tossing away the dampened tissue, she clenched her fingers into fists, feeling almost as helpless as he.

Slowly, and by degrees, she became aware that they were no longer alone in the room. She felt the silent, lurking presence like a shadow sliding in the door. She didn't have to turn to know who it was. There was only one man who radiated with that eerie, bone-chilling aura.

"He knew, didn't he?" she said softly.

"Ma'am?" the voice, quiet and polite, almost made her shiver.

"He knew this was going to happen." She said, her tone flat and cold. "That's why he didn't want to have the surgery."

There was a moment's hesitation, and then the shadow answered. "I wouldn't know, ma'am. He never discussed that with me."

She turned to face the intruder, her arms folded tightly across her chest as she looked him up and down. "The hell you wouldn't," she said grimly. "You were there, watching. Watching him. Watching us. You saw everything, didn't you? It's what you do. You gather intelligence, assess the situation. You heard what he didn't say. You saw what he wouldn't show me. You knew."

She saw the swift calculation that passed through his dark, raptor's face. Had she not known better, she'd have taken it for a grudging measure of respect.

"Yes ma'am."

She studied him for a long moment, forcing herself to hold his black, unswerving gaze. Of all the men on her husband's personal security detail, only this one truly unnerved her. Unlike the others, Rafael Cordova was no trained watch dog. He was something different, something predatory: a killer, a dark and soulless thief. She hadn't asked what he'd done for the agency before his assignment as one of the DCI's chief Security and Protection officers. She didn't need to: Assassin. The word was fairly written in his soul –or the hollow where one should have been. It was in his body language, his economy of movement, in the dark and fluid grace with which he carried himself.

Likewise, she had never allowed herself to wonder at the invisible cords which bound this man so closely to her husband, but she sensed the ties all the same. Cordova was no man's servant, and yet he served her husband in a position that was obviously far beneath his station. Not only that, but he did it with a silent and unquestioning loyalty that frankly confounded her.

It occurred to her then that perhaps the part of Clay she didn't know, the part of himself he would not allow her to look upon, was the part of himself that only this man before her truly understood. Suddenly, after all the years, all the denial, all the deception, she wanted to look. She wanted to understand. She wanted to know him before it was too late.

"Why?" she asked softly, her voice both a demand and a plea. "Why didn't he tell me?"

Cordova moved further into the room, gliding on the lengthening shadows. He stopped at the end of the bed and studied his principal, his hands folded behind his back in a tell-tale, military pose.

"A man like that," he said quietly, "a man who has everything, he knows better than anybody just how little it really is." He arched one ebony brow as he gazed down at the too-still figure. "Money… power… none of it really matters. At the end of the day, you can't trust it. At the end of the day, all that you really have, all that you can really count on is yourself."

"There are the people that love you. The people you love." She protested.

Cordova nodded. "There are," he said mildly. "But it doesn't mean you can trust them."

"That's a pretty lonely view of life."

He shrugged. "Life is a lonely thing." He said, his tone matter of fact. "The only difference is whether we live it alone together… or just alone. We're all of us alone, ma'am. Inside, all the time, we're always alone. The trick is to accept it, accept who we are, and live with it."

"And he couldn't live with it," she said bitterly.

Cordova shook his head. "No, ma'am," he said quietly. "He did live with it. Every day." He slipped around the side of the bed, carefully studying the machines and monitors. "I think it was living like this he couldn't accept."

She felt a small chill race through her at the implication in his words, felt the cold sweat break out on her palms as she watched him reach out and trace his fingers over the myriad of buttons on the heart monitor. God, he couldn't… he wouldn't be suggesting…

"Don't touch that!" she snapped, and felt her stomach twist at the slight arch of his brow and the dark and knowing look in his eyes. He knew damned well what she'd been thinking. He knew it, because she'd been right …or at least, she hadn't been wrong. The man was a killer after all. She felt the cold fingers of fear slither around her heart as she inserted herself between Cordova and the hospital bed, forcing him back.

He raised his hands gently as he backed away from her, then pushed them slowly into his pockets. His eyes, however, did not back down.

"At the end of the day," he said quietly, "a man who can't depend on himself has nothing left. A man dependent on others is a man already dead. Your husband knew that. That's why he didn't tell you."

"I don't believe that," she said coldly.

He shook his head. "No ma'am. I know you don't. You being a Marine, you were trained differently. –Never leave a man behind. It's a soldier's creed, and a good one, but it doesn't serve for our kind of work. He's left plenty of men behind, so have I. A lot of them were friends, but it didn't matter. We weren't soldiers. We were shadows, and the war we fought, the streets we walked, --we walked them alone."

She looked at him, uncomprehending. "How can you live in a world like that?"

He shook his head slowly. "No," he said quietly. "I don't think that's the question. The real question is why did you try to live in ours?"

"What?"

Cordova shrugged and cocked his head, studying her as if she were an interesting quarry caught in his scope. "You know what he is," he said quietly. "You've always known, even though you don't agree with it. --And yet you're still here. I have to ask myself why that is."

The silence fell between them then, punctuated only by the faint, steady beep of the monitor and measured hiss of the respirator. She could feel the man's ebony gaze sweeping over her, passing through her as if she were little more than an inconsequential fancy.

"He didn't tell you, because there wasn't any point." Cordova said quietly. "A man like Mr. Webb, he might have money and he might have power, but the only thing he's really got to hold to is his pride, and he'd rather die a whole man than live as half a one. He'd rather you leave him behind than live with him out of duty. He loved you, but at the end of the day, he was no less alone for it."

The crack of her palm against his cheek was a sharp report in the hushed quiet of the room. There was a moment of deathly stillness, a lethal fire that leaped in the black eyes before it was quickly quelled and extinguished. Then, incredibly, a small slow smile spread across the dark, pirate's face.

"Truth hurts, doesn't it?"

"Get out!" she hissed, "Get the hell out of here!"

He simply stood there, unperturbed. His gaze flicked briefly to the still figure in the bed and then came back to rest upon her with a keen, unwavering intensity.

"Do you love him?"

The question was so gentle, so unexpected, that she found herself answering, in spite of her fury.

"Yes!"

He nodded slowly. "Then prove it," he said simply.

"What?"

"Prove it," he said again, and tilted his head to indicate the array of machines beside the bed. "He didn't tell you because this isn't the way he wanted to live, and he thought he could only trust himself to make that decision. Now the decision isn't his to make. He's exactly where he didn't want to be. He's helpless. He can't do this himself, and the only one he has to count on is you."

She felt the sudden, eerie chill of his words, saw the flat, expression in those black, soulless eyes. "Are you suggesting—

He shook his head. "No, ma'am, I'm not suggesting anything. I'm merely stating a simple truth. You say you love him, now you've got to show him. Sometime between now and morning, you've got to make a choice: do you go on alone? --Or alone together?"

She was shaking now, trembling with truth of his words, with the enormity of it all. Damn this psychotic son of a bitch, but he was right. Clay would not want to live like this. He wouldn't want to live as half a man. He would not want to live as burden to her, thinking she no longer loved him. The trouble was, she did love him. She always had, and she was so damned angry with him for thinking that she didn't.

She realized now that that anger was a luxury she could no longer afford. Somehow almost without her realizing it, that arrogant, annoying son of a bitch had become an integral part of her life, part of her soul, part of her being, and she suddenly registered the overwhelming, terrifying fear of being without him. He didn't want to live as half a man? Well, damn him, she didn't want to live as half a woman, either! And that, she knew with sudden clarity, was exactly what she would be if the sun rose in the morning and Clayton Webb did not rise with it. The tears were streaking down her face now, running hot and hard with the raw emotion she suddenly could not contain.

Cordova simply looked at her, his eyes shifting to a softer shade of black. "Together then," he said quietly, and handed her the box of tissues from the bedside. She took them from him, and he stepped away, slipping through the shadows of the room and disappearing into the night.

She yanked a tissue from the box, wiped her eyes, blew her nose and dried her tears. "Together," she said firmly, coming back to stand over the bed. "Do you hear me, Clay? Together."

Reaching out, she framed his face in her hands, bent and pressed her forehead tight to his. "Together, God damn you. We're doing this together. So don't you die on me, you bastard. I'll never forgive you if you die on me now."

The magnitude of emotion broke loose inside her then, rolling over her, leveling her with the realization of everything she had almost lost, of everything she still stood to lose if she could not live up to a shadow's challenge.

Somewhere along the line, she had failed this man. They had failed each other. She didn't know how, and she didn't know where. Maybe it was in the little things, or perhaps a single big one, but somehow he had gotten this insane idea in his head that she could live without him, that she would even want to. How could a man, so smart, so charismatic, so educated and self-assured be so goddamned stupid? And how could she have been so damned blind? –Or had she?

Had she really?

Her knees gave out beneath her then, and she collapsed into the chair beside the bed as the great, shuddering sobs racked through her body. Where a few minutes ago she had been afraid to touch him, now she was terrified to let him go. Fumbling blindly with the levers, she dropped railing of the bed and clawed at the blanket until she found his hand. She clutched it tightly, desperately, lacing her fingers through his limp ones, binding him to her in the only way she could manage. She inched the chair closer to the bed, dropped her head to the mattress and pressed her nose close to his body, inhaling his scent. It was strange and sickly, a mixture of antiseptic and sweat with only the faintest hint of the soap he used, but it was still somehow uniquely him, and it comforted her… almost.

For there, in the darkness, clinging tightly to this man she loved, this man she now realized she so desperately needed, she finally understood the truth in a killer's words. Alone together, or just alone, it really didn't matter. It didn't change who you were inside. It didn't change the fact that at the end of the day, the only one you could truly know, truly count on was yourself. No matter who loved you, no matter who you loved, you could never truly know all of them, only the bits and pieces they allowed you to see. The rest of it, you simply had to take on faith. The best you could do was stand beside them, and hope their faith in you was as strong as yours in them.

She lay there for a long time, listening to the beep of the monitor, the whoosh of the respirator, feeling the soft, limp warmth of his fingers in hers, breathing in his scent, wondering if these things would still be here when the morning came. Wondering what she would do if they weren't.

She pressed her face into his shoulder, absorbing the silent, warm essence of him as she finally let herself drift into sleep.

She had never been more alone in her life.

The steady beep of the monitors in her mind slowly faded to the one now chirping softly in her ear. It was an eerie feeling sitting here in the dimly lit room recalling a night when he had been dying and she had been the one keeping vigil at the bedside. Now their positions were reversed. She was the one in the bed and he was the one in the chair, offering her a second chance at life.

The question was, why? Was it his own special brand of ironic revenge? Or was it possible that he actually gave a damn? She didn't know. It was possible she might never know. The thought brought her up short. Was it possible that Clay had not been certain of her motives either? The way he was studying her now, as if she were some sort of alien specimen placed beneath his microscope made her wonder. What had he thought when he'd woken up to find her there, clutching his hand and crying?

She'd just been so damned glad he'd made it through; she'd never stopped to consider what he had been thinking. She'd made herself a thousand promises that night. Whatever it took, however hard it might be, she was going to pull him through this. She was going to show him how much she loved him, how much she'd needed him. No matter what it took, she was going to get him back.

She wondered now if she hadn't tried too hard.

Everything she'd done seemed to turn to ash beneath her finger tips. He'd resented her efforts, her attention, her patience, and worst of all, her very touch. Rebuilding the body was one thing; Clay had thrown himself into the physical therapy with a grim determination that was almost as painful to watch as it was rewarding. Rebuilding the soul, however, was another matter entirely. He was so different, so angry and brooding and sullen that she was never certain how much of his volatile personality was caused by the stroke and how much was simply his own feelings for her stripped bare.

He had a point. Things hadn't been good between them in those months between his heart attack and the surgery that had caused his stroke –the surgery she'd talked him into having. She had been the one who had allowed the distance to grow between them, shutting him out of her bed, out of her thoughts, out of her heart. He hadn't said a word, had simply waited… and kept waiting.

She'd never given much thought as to what it must have been like for him: the wondering, the uncertainty, the endless wait for judgment. Watching him now, sitting there in that hospital chair, weighing her with those dark, fathomless eyes and stony expression, she thought she had a taste of what it must have been. Everything that she was seemed to hang on his response, and yet he said nothing.

She felt the chill of fear settle over her, and resisted the urge to pull the blankets closer, to rub at her arms and warm herself. It wasn't supposed to matter this much. _He _wasn't supposed to matter this much –not anymore—but he did. Damn it, he still did.

She forced herself to remain silent. There was nothing more she could do or say. She had given all her testimony, laid out all her evidence, argued her case as best she could. There was nothing more to do but let him process it… and wait.


	7. Chapter 7: Intensity

**Part VII: Intensity**

The rain had stopped. The storm had passed, but the damp droplets that still streaked the windows vibrated occasionally with the roll of distant thunder that could only be felt, not heard. Clay stared for a long moment at the wet, distorted nightscape as he slowly absorbed her explanation, trying to reconcile her memory with his own.

He didn't remember any of it. He didn't remember a goddamned thing beyond waking up in a hospital bed with the morning sun glaring in his face and the sudden, horrifying realization that he couldn't do a single thing about it. He'd tried to turn his face, to raise hand against the blinding rays, but nothing had responded. He'd tried to speak, to call for someone to shut the curtains, only to discover that his tongue didn't seem to work, that he no longer had the words. He'd lain there for a long moment, feeling the cold, queasy sensation of panic sliding over him as he took stock of his situation, willing each limb and muscle of his body to respond only to discover that all circuits were busy –or more likely fried. After a long moment of concentration, he'd been rewarded with a faint movement beneath his blankets –his right foot. He'd tried for the hand, but it seemed leaden, weighted down. The left felt as if it weren't even there at all. God, just how screwed up was he, anyway?

His brain had felt muzzy, confused, and he'd dimly registered the rawness in his throat. Ventilator, he thought dimly, and wondered how long he'd been on it and when they had finally pulled it out. Christ, why had they even bothered? They should have just let him go.

He remembered laying there a while longer, trying to piece together the string of events that had landed him in this untenable situation, trying to assess the damage, to figure out just how bad it was, when he suddenly registered the sensation of movement, a motion he had not attempted. Slowly, carefully, he'd tilted his head and seen the dark curl of hair at his shoulder, lightly salted with threads of gray, and the long slim fingers tangled with his own. She'd studied him then, with those eyes, dark and brown and achingly beautiful, even with the dark shadows that lurked beneath them. He remembered the slow, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as she'd disengaged her fingers from his, reaching up and gently touching his cheek, cradling it firmly against her hand.

"It's all right," she'd said softly. "It's ok. I'm here. I'm not leaving you. I'm not going anywhere. We're going to get through this, Clay. We're going to get through this together."

He'd closed his eyes then, unable to look her, unable to bear any more. The worst had finally happened. His nightmare had been complete.

Looking at her now was like seeing her then, that same haunted expression that twisted at his insides.

"You looked so damned guilty," he said softly.

"I felt it," she admitted, and the knot in his stomach twisted even more. His ravaged, unresponsive face must have betrayed something of his thoughts, because she hastened to add to her response. "It's not what you think, Clay."

There had been a time when he would have jumped at that, would have pounced upon her with any one of a dozen retorts designed to bait her, make her angry, lead her down the cruel path of logic to the trap he'd set for her. Most importantly, he'd have done it, if only to distract her from the fact that she'd caught a glimpse into the true inner workings of his mind. But standing here now, it just didn't seem to matter. The muscles in his leg and knee and hip ached from the strain of bearing his weight. He felt tired, his head was spinning with what she had told him, and he just didn't feel like playing the same old game. The thin arm chair beside her bed suddenly looked incredibly inviting, but too damned far to walk to. However, it proved to be within cane's reach, and he used the silver tipped handle to hook one bentwood arm and drag it nearer to the bed. Easing down into the chair, he dropped the walking stick against the bed and leaned back into the chair, his eyes intent upon her, quiet and waiting.

"It was my fault," she said quietly.

"What was your fault?" he asked wearily.

"Everything," she answered, her voice sounding small in the quiet room. "Your stroke, the surgery, us…" she shook her head. "It never would have come to that if it hadn't been for me. I was so damned angry with you, and I couldn't let it go. I wouldn't let it go. It was destroying us, and I knew it, but I couldn't let go of it because…"

He waited, the silence stretching out between them, but still she didn't continue.

"I was afraid," she said finally, expelling the words with a soft whoosh of breath that was half a sigh and half a sob.

He said nothing, trying to wrap his mind around it. Afraid? What in the hell did she have to be afraid of? He'd been the one who'd spent the last twenty years in repressed terror. Afraid that she'd discover what he'd done, afraid that she'd see who he really was. Now, for the first time, he was wondering if perhaps he shouldn't have taken that question and turned it around.

"I was so terrified of losing you," she said softly. "That night I finally realized just how stupid it all was. I kept going over it, wondering where it all went wrong, how we'd gotten so far off course, and I realized maybe we'd never really been right to begin with."

Clay felt the cold knot tighten in the pit of his stomach, and worked very hard to maintain his stoic expression as he forced himself to listen.

"I tried to figure it out, tried to pinpoint what it was I'd said or done to make you so uncertain of me, but there was nothing. I remember being so damned disgusted with you, and wondering how you could get such a crazy idea in your head –and how I could be so blind as to never notice. Then I realized that wasn't exactly true."

He frowned slightly, not exactly sure of where she was taking this.

She raised her head from the position of bowed penitence and gazed at him directly, her brown eyes dark and serious. "Do you remember what you said to me that day at Manderley after your mother shot Tanveer?"

He nodded slowly. It was engraved upon his memory. In the months following their first, ill-fated attempt at a relationship, he'd replayed that final conversation a thousand times; looking for answers, trying to determine what he might have said or done that could have changed the inevitable. Over the years, he'd carefully examined every word, compiling his list of lessons learned, of mistakes never to be made again if he were ever afforded the miracle of a second chance. By the time that unlikely miracle was finally granted to him, he had formed from that single conversation a short, but inviolable list of rules to live by if he wished to live with Sarah:

Never allow her to think you were dead if you weren't.

Never lie to her.

Never use her.

Never put her in the path of danger, because you can no longer be objective.

And above all else: Never, ever take her for granted, because God only knows how long she will be willing to put up with your shit.

Oh yes, he remembered that conversation. He remembered every wretched word.

"You told me I was tough, and I didn't need much." She said quietly.

"I was wrong about that."

She shook head slowly, her lips twisting into a small, painful smile. "You have no idea."

"I needed you," she said softly. "I needed you the way you were in Paraguay, counting on me, depending on me, trusting me when you didn't even trust yourself. I needed you the way you were in Samarra."

"--And the way I was after the stroke," he added, his mouth twisting into a derisive scowl. "You needed me weak."

"No," she said, shaking her head. "I needed you to need _me_," she cried, and he could hear the tears welling in her voice. "More than anything else, more than your work, more than your life, I wanted to be the one person you couldn't live without, the one sacrifice you couldn't make. I had to know that you would always come back to me, Clay. I needed to know that you would never leave me behind."

He raked a tired hand through his hair. "I needed you," he said gruffly, "I've always needed you. Damn it, Sarah, you were everything to me! You were my whole life!"

"Then why did you sign those damned papers? Why did you let me go?" She asked, her words sounding unnaturally quiet in the wake of his frustrated exclamation.

He stared intently at the silver handle of the cane, absorbed in the intricate engraving that laced the handle. "Because I thought that life was over," he said truthfully, "and there didn't seem much point in asking you to stay."

"You should have tried it," she said acidly. "You might have been surprised."

His eyes flew to hers, dark and unreadable, and burning with an intensity that almost frightened her.

"And if I had asked you to stay? What would you have said?"

"I think," she said slowly, "I'd have asked you why."

"Why you should?"

She shook her head. "Why you wanted me to. As I recall, those days you spent most of your time trying to drive me away."

His hand tightened noticeably on the silver handle, the knuckles going white and bloodless. "And if I'd said I was trying to set you free? Trying to release you from your obligation to a pathetic, miserable bastard you clearly didn't love anymore?"

Her fingers flew to her face, brushing away the quick well of newly sprung tears. "I'd have told you how wrong you were."

"Was I?"

She considered this for a moment and then shook her head with a faint smile. "No, not entirely. You were a miserable bastard, Clay. In fact, you were a truly rotten son of a bitch. You would smile and make an effort for Pen, but you were so sullen, so angry with me. At first, I tried to listen to the doctors, I tried to tell myself it was just the stroke, tried to believe it was just all the personality changes the told me to expect." She choked back a sob. "But it didn't get any better, it didn't change things. I knew you blamed me. It didn't matter how much I loved you. It didn't seem to matter how much I tried. Everything I did was wrong. Everything I tried to do only made you angrier, only made you hate me more."

"I didn't hate you," he said softly. "I hated myself."

"I know," she said faintly, her voice sounding small. "But I thought you must hate me, too. It was my fault. I was the one who made the decisions for you. I was the one who convinced you to have the surgery. God, I was probably even the reason you had the damned heart attack!"

He shot her a sidelong look that was a mixture of irritation, disgust and, oddly enough, profound patience. "It wasn't your fault. Not the stroke, not the heart attack, not any of it. Believe me; I know the life I've led. I take sole responsibility for all of my own medical problems."

She shook her head. "You don't understand, Clay, all these years, all that time I knew how you felt! I knew how much you needed me and I used it against you! God, the uncertainty! It must have eaten you up inside. It's my fault… all of it… what happened with Harm… your heart attack, your not wanting to have the surgery, the stroke… I caused this!"

He snorted. "You give yourself too much credit, Mac."

He caught her wide-eyed stare and smiled ruefully. "You thought I didn't know? You spent the better part of twenty years "handling" a handler. I know you, sweetheart. I know what makes you tick. I watched you for years with Harm… with Brumby... I read your psych evaluations long before I ever involved you in one of my missions." He paused and drew a careful breath. "I always knew what you were doing, Sarah," he said quietly. "I just allowed you to do it."

"Why?" she asked hoarsely. "Why in God's name would you do that? Why would you live like that? Why would you even want to?"

"Because," he said grimly. "I didn't have choice. I needed you. It was what I had to do."

Something in her face crumbled then, some last, inner wall of defense he hadn't realized was still standing. She simply looked at him, her dark eyes brimming, and he suddenly saw not the frail, aging woman fighting a desperate battle for life, nor the iron willed Marine Colonel he had once been married to, but the lost little girl, still sad, still frightened, still terrified of abandonment.

"I'm sorry," she shuddered, her voice trembling with the old pain so freshly exposed. "God, Clay, I'm so sorry."

"So am I." He hated the tone of finality in the words. It felt like a concession of defeat, but he could think of nothing else to say.

"You don't understand!" she sobbed, her breath coming in great heaving gasps. "God damn it, why can't you just understand?"

He slumped in the chair, and massaged his aching brow. "Understand what?" he asked dully.

"I needed you too, damn it! – I needed you more! I couldn't let you see it! I couldn't let you know, because if you knew, you'd leave me… If you knew how much I needed you, you'd leave me… you'd leave me like…

The words were lost in the flow of her tears, but he wasn't about to let them slip away. He pulled himself from the chair and stood over bed. Reaching with his good hand, he touched her face, forcing her to look at him.

"Like who?" he asked softly. "Like your mother?"

She only cried harder as the old wound was reopened, the buried pain spilling out. He searched his memory, connecting the dots between what she had told him and what he had observed.

"Like Brumby?" he said, and saw the instantaneous response as she slowly bent forward, crumbling in on herself.

"Like Harm?" he murmured, and felt the vise of emotion constrict his lungs as she toppled against him, burying her head against his chest.

_Like me…_ he thought wretchedly, feeling the lump grow in his own throat. How goddamned many times had he left her? Walked away for a mission, for some supposed crisis of national security, and left her wondering if he'd ever be back? It didn't really matter that he had come back. He was as guilty as the rest, for he'd left her all the same.

"I'm not leaving, Sarah," he said firmly running his hand over the silk scarf wrapped tightly about her head, trailing his fingers down the back of her neck and swallowing hard at the bones that protruded too starkly through her skin. "Not this time, I promise. I won't leave you again."

"You will," she sobbed, her words broken, almost hysterical. "You will, I know you will!"

"How do you know?"

"Because I was stupid!" she cried, her words muffled against the front of his shirt. "Because I let myself need you, because I let myself love you! –And I can't love anyone! I'm too screwed up! I ruin it, I always ruin it! If I love them, I ruin them, and they leave, they always leave!"

"I'm sorry I loved you," she sobbed. "I didn't mean to love you..."

The words were ludicrous, hysterical and irrational and bearing the kind of twisted, illogical logic that could only have made sense in the mind of a scarred and abandoned eight year old girl. He supposed there was just enough of a similarly scarred thirteen year old boy left inside of him that he perfectly understood their meaning.

_I'm sorry I loved you. I'm sorry I screwed up your life…_

God, yes, he understood that. He understood it in ways she didn't even know.

Somehow, it made that absurd, apologetic declaration of love more meaningful than any other she had ever granted him.

"I know," he said softly, running his fingers over her cheek. "I know." The words sounded choked even to his own ears. "I didn't mean to love you, either."

She froze against his chest, her breath catching in her throat. Slowly she pulled away from him, her eyes desperately searching his.

"You do understand," she whispered.

He nodded slowly and released her. "Yeah," he said quietly. "I think I finally do."

God, she hadn't meant to say that. She hadn't meant to admit it out loud, but damn Clayton Webb and his relentless, inquisitive, probing mind, she should have known he'd extract it from her some day. She stared up at him for a long moment, trying to read him, trying to decipher the intensity of his expression, and the jumbled emotions that flashed briefly in his gray-green eyes.

Slowly she pushed away from him and reached for the box of tissues beside the bed. She plucked to free and dried her tears with a small, humorless laugh.

"Christ," she said, her voice sounding weak and tired. "How screwed up are we?"

"Pretty screwed," he said, his eyes as murky and unreadable as ever. "God knows nobody else would understand us."

"I'm not sure _we_ understand us," she returned.

He raised his shoulder in a slight shrug. "Maybe not, but I think we're finally making a start."

She blew her nose and smiled faintly. "You may be right about that."

Somewhere out in the dark San Francisco night, another volley of distant thunder must have rolled, for there was a faint shudder of the glass in the windows and a gentle vibration of the water in the plastic cup on the table beside her bed.

Clay leaned heavily on the cane and stared down at the tip so carefully positioned between his polished black wingtips. "It's too bad we couldn't have talked like this before," he said at last. "Maybe it would have changed things."

"Maybe," she said, wiping her eyes. "Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered at all. Maybe we just weren't ready for it then."

A small muscle ticked in his jaw. He kept his gaze glued solidly to the floor. "Would it matter now?"

She let herself sag all the way back into the bed and closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger in an attempt to ward off the headache that was building. "What do you mean?"

There was a moment of hesitation. "If I asked you to come back, would it matter now?"

She dropped her hand and stared at him in open disbelief. "You can't be serious!"

Somewhere along the way, he must have screwed up the courage to look her again, for his eyes were steady upon hers. "Why not?"

She laughed harshly. "My God! You really have to ask? We spent most of our adult lives together and apparently never figured out how to talk to each other!"

"We're talking now."

She shook her head. "You don't fix twenty years in twenty minutes."

"No," he agreed. "You don't. It takes a lot more time than that, maybe more than we have, but you don't fix anything if you don't try." His eyes were solemn and unrelenting. "It's the same choice, Sarah," he said quietly, "the time and place and circumstances have changed, but it's the same decision, and I'm still waiting for an answer. Will you stay with me? Yes? Or no?"

She shook her head again and swallowed hard, fighting back the tears that were burning in the back of her throat. "It's too late for that now," she said softly. "It's too late for us."

He cocked his head at her, and even though she knew he was just as beaten as she, she could still see a bit of the old Webb challenge in him. "Funny," he said grimly. "I never took you for a quitter."

"I'm not a quitter!"

"Then come with me," he said. "Let me take you to Switzerland. I'll get us a house near the clinic. Let me take care of you."

"No."

He scowled impatiently. "Then fine, damn it! Let me stay here. Let me be with you. Let's just be together for however much time we have."

"No!" she said, her voice growing desperate now.

"Why the hell not?"

"Damn it, Clay! Do you have any idea of how hard this is? –Of how hard it's going to be? God! I'd run away from it if I could, but I can't! I don't have a choice. You do." She paused, drawing a ragged breath. "You do," she said quietly, her brown eyes dark and pleading. "It's bad enough, doing this alone," she grated, "but I can deal with it. What I can't deal with is you, coming in, trying to save the day, and then running out when you realize you can't."

He folded his arms across his chest and regarded her with a critical look. "Is that why you've been pushing Pen away? Is that why you won't let her stay with you?"

She tightened her jaw, fighting back the shuddery emotion that threatened to consume her and nodded grimly. "Yes," she replied. "I know she doesn't mean it, but I can see it, Clay. I can see what it does to her, and I can't watch that. I can't do that to her."

He dropped his arms, pulling back the tails of his suit coat and thrusting his hands into his pockets in that familiar old motion that suggested both irritation and control. "She's barely twenty, Sarah," he sighed. "She's a young woman now, not a kid. You're not giving her enough credit. Pen's tougher than you think."

"Funny," she said dryly, "considering you came in here just a little while ago telling me how fragile she was."

He scowled at her. "What I said was that she can't do this alone. –Neither can you." He offered her a small, challenging smirk. "You need me, Mac. You said it yourself."

She shook her head. "It's not a question of needing you, Clay. It's counting on you I'm worried about."

Something flitted across his face, a vague, fleeting emotion that could have been anger or hurt or a mixture of the two. She couldn't be sure, for the shutters came down then, turning his eyes cold and flinty.

"After everything we've been through, you actually think I can't handle this?"

"Damn it, Clay! I'm not sure _I_ can handle this! Look at me! –Not at this screwed up fantasy you have in your mind, look at _me._ I'm dying, damn it! After everything we've been through, after everything that's happened, how can you possibly want this? How can you want me?"

He studied her for one long moment in the low ambient light of the hospital room, the silence practically radiating from every pore in his body. He moved suddenly, a sharp, definitive motion and stepped back to the bedside. Hooking his cane over the railing, he raised his eyes to the environmental control panel above the bed and frowned.

"Lights!" he called sharply, "Full."

She gasped as the recessed lighting surged to full power, bathing the entire room in light. She drew further back into her pillows, frantically pulling the covers up around her thin body.

"What are you doing?" she demanded, blinking against the intensity of the halogen beams that glared down from their recessed ports in ceiling above her bed.

He dropped both hands to the railing and smiled that odd, lopsided smile. "Looking at you," he said practically.

Before she could protest, before she could even think to react, he struck like a snake, snagging the edge of her blankets with his good hand and ripping them away. She gasped and froze at his grim expression, watching as the color of those cold, analytical eyes shifted from gray to green to gold, searing along her thin frame with a laser-like scan that noted everything, missed nothing. When his eyes finally returned to her face, she knew that he had seen it all, that he finally saw her for what she really was, inside and out. He would leave now, she thought dully. He would turn and walk out of this room and out of her life, for there couldn't possibly be anything here that he wanted.

Except that he didn't leave; he simply looked at her.

Clay dropped the sheet then, releasing it into a soft pool of fabric at her feet. He stood for another moment that stretched between them like eternity. Then with a slow, lithe movement, he reached for her, his good hand stretching towards her cheek. The thought of those precise, probing fingers extending towards, seeking to find more hollows, more imperfections, more flaws, was more than she could bear. She couldn't help it. She flinched, squeezing her eyes tightly shut and turning her face away.

_God, no more, please, no more…_

For a moment, she stupidly thought her prayer had been answered. There was a hesitation, a pause of movement, a soft rustle of suit fabric as the hand was drawn away. She gritted her teeth and bit back the tears, but the reprieve she had prayed for was short-lived. She heard another soft whisper of movement and then she felt it, the warm weight of living flesh against hers, the clumsy, ungraceful brush of a hand against her cheek.

--Clumsy?

Her eyes flew open at the realization, and she turned towards him, into the touch, into the wooden fingers that trailed over her skin. She stared in disbelief at the hand that traveled over her, trailing awkwardly along her jaw, over the harsh lines of collarbone and down the protruding bone between her breasts to the thin washboard surface of her ribcage. His hand, she thought dimly, his left hand. Clumsy and floundering and damaged, this was the hand that he hid from the world, the hand he disguised with trouser pockets and that damned cane, the hand he never allowed anyone to touch. And yet, impossibly, this was the hand with which he touched her: exploring her imperfections …revealing his own.

His stiff fingers traced along the jutting line of her hip, down her knee and paused, closing over the bony joint in a loose, sloppy squeeze. Without another word, he removed his hand and returned it to her face, ungraceful fingers brushing at her cheek and stroking the silk scarf that bound what was left of her hair.

"Beautiful," he murmured, the words so soft and indistinct, she was sure she hadn't heard correctly.

He leaned over her then, his eyes dark and serious, and flecked with tiny hints of emerald that gleamed between the sparks of silver and gold.

"You think I can't handle this?" He shook his head. "You'll have to do better, Sarah. This doesn't scare me. This doesn't even come close."

Her breath stilled in her throat and she had to remind herself to breathe, had to struggle to keep the tremor out of her voice as she asked, "What does scare you?"

He tilted his head, indicating the open door. "--Walking out of this room, going back to DC, going back to an empty house and an empty life."

He shook his head. It was a small, uneasy gesture that was not quite nonchalant. "I'm tired of living like that. It's not living. It's just…" he shrugged slightly, "…marking time."

She opened her mouth to speak and then paused, uncertain of what to say. She felt shaky now, scared, and uneasy and not quite sure of what should come next. She cast about wildly, searching for the right words, the right response, and then her eye fell on the plastic cup of water. Her stomach turned over as she suddenly realized that perhaps trembling she felt was not entirely her own.

Clay saw the sudden shift in her expression as it moved from fear to uncertainty to outright panic. For half a second, he thought he was the reason. Then he felt it: a long low vibration that built so steadily that it took him a moment to register that the source came from somewhere outside himself. He heard the faint rattle of glass against metal and frowned at the nightscape outside the window. The skies had cleared, the lights of the city twinkled in the darkness, but no lightning creased the sky.

"I thought the storm was over," he said as the faint rumble grew to an alarming crescendo.

Sarah's hand clamped down upon his wrist. "That's not thunder," she said sharply and yanked him down onto the bed as the floor suddenly lurched beneath his feet.

The world seemed to shift and roll around them then. In the brief flashes of light they had before the power went out completely, he caught a glimpse of the vertical blinds swaying wildly against the windows and the monitors and IV stand rocking crazily back and forth before finally toppling to the floor. Then everything was cast into a cacophony of darkness and sound.

He plastered himself over Sarah, covering her frail, razor-thin body with his own as the crystal panel charting screen tore free from the wall beside the bed and crashed against his shoulder. He pressed her face against his chest, trying to shield her from the falling debris as books, medical supplies and other small objects tumbled from the overhead shelves and cabinets. He was dimly aware of the shrieking monitors and the screams of terrified patients as the enormous plate glass windows buckled and snapped, disintegrating into a cascade of jagged shards that imploded into the room. The bolt of adrenaline shot through him then, firing through neurons and suddenly he was consumed by one single fragment of thought: not like this, damn it. It wasn't going to end like this.

If there was one possibility of death he'd always dreaded, it was being caught in a building collapse. God knew, he'd had enough near misses to warrant it. There was Bosnia and Serbia with Duncan, that time in Turkey when the earthquake had struck, and that damned Christmas in –where the hell had he been, Croatia?—when he'd negotiated the release of Rabb's brother while the rebels had tried to bring his hotel room down on top of him. If this was really it, if his number was finally up, then there was only one way he wanted to go out of this world and fate had presented him with just that opportunity. He'd be damned if he wasn't going to take it.

The floor seemed to tilt beneath them and the rubber-wheeled bed scooted across the room like a car on an amusement park ride. He pulled back a little, putting most of his weight upon his elbows and coaxing Sarah's face from the sheltering hollow of his body. It was pitch black in the room, save for the dim patch of night sky where the window once had been, yet he could just make out her shining pupils, wide and dark and filled with the same naked expression that he knew must be burning in his. He kissed her then, sealing his mouth over hers in a movement that was both desperate and demanding. He teased her lips, seeking entry to her mouth, and they parted gently to admit him.

The black, reeling, screaming world seemed to fade away in that instant and he was only aware of her –of them—as the last of the barriers dropped between them. Everything was there in that kiss, all thing things they could not say to each other, and all the things they felt but could not explain. The fear, the loneliness, the pain, the anger, the despair and regret, all if it was there, flowing between them, and they gave it to each other, taking and accepting and forgiving at last.

It ended, as all good things must, with a soft sigh of shared regret as he withdrew from her mouth and brushed a final, gentle kiss across her bruised lips. He dropped his head to her shoulder, and felt the sharp line of her collarbone jutting through her skin. He moved lower, and was oddly reassured by the crazy, erratic rhythm of her heart. He turned his head slightly, pressing his ear against her breast and let the sound of her heartbeat wash over him, matching it to his own. He drew a shallow, ragged breath and as he exhaled, he felt it: the slow, unfolding blossom of hope. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. Where there was life, there was hope and drumming strong and steady beneath his ear was proof of both. She was going to beat this thing, damn it. He was going to see to that.

Gradually he became aware of the shrieking din around him. The shrill screech of hospital monitors blended with the wailing moans of patients, and the blaring of horns and car alarms filtering in from the gaping portal of the shattered window. Far off in the distance the steady keening of a fire engine pierced the cries of the trembling city and from somewhere below an ambulance exploded out onto the street with a sharp blast of lights and sirens that quickly faded into the night.

The monitor that had toppled to the floor was squealing loudly in his ear and he muttered a soft curse. Levering himself up onto one elbow, he felt the crunch of broken glass and tugged at the blankets that covered her, sending a myriad of tiny shards cascading from the bed to the floor. Fumbling around in the darkness, he found his cane, miraculously still hooked to the side of the hospital bed. It had become wedged between the mattress and the bed rail and as the generators kicked in, flooding the hallways with glaring halogen beams, he was able to see well enough to work it free. Taking hold of it with his good hand, he tossed it lightly in the air and let the tapered mahogany shaft slide through his fingers before closing around the tip. Reaching out, he used it to snag the offensive device and drew it nearer to the bed where he silenced the monitor with three sharp blows of the polished silver handle. He let his head drop back to the pillow beside Sarah, momentarily savoring the relief from the electronic din. Then he raised his head and offered her an unrepentant smile.

"Sorry," he said, "it had to go."

She closed her eyes and drew a long, shaky breath before opening them again. "I'm not complaining," she said. "You want to do something about the other fifty down this hall?"

He chuckled softly and rolled away from her, hooking the cane back over the side of the bed. He scanned her face by the dim rays of the emergency lighting that filtered in from the hallway and reached out to touch her cheek with the awkward fingers of his left hand.

"Are you ok?" he asked, suddenly worried that in his clumsy effort to protect her, he might have done more harm than good.

She nodded and reached up to touch his temple. Her fingers came away dark with blood. "You're bleeding," she said.

He touched the cut with his good hand, followed it to his scalp, and felt a fine sliver of glass fall from his hair. "The window," he said, by way of explanation and looked her over more carefully. "You're not cut, are you?"

She shook her head. He expelled another sigh of relief and sagged against the far railing. She shifted slightly, making more room on the narrow mattress and rolled to her side to face him. He lay his head on the pillow beside her and they stared at each other for a long moment, trying to absorb everything that had happened this night.

"What," he asked finally, "in God's name was that?"

"That," she said, mimicking his tone, "was an earthquake. They say we've been due for one. It's been unusually hot and muggy for November. Out here they call that earthquake weather."

"Are they always like this?"

She shook her head. "No, this was a pretty good one. We had a couple of little ones last year, a 3.5 and a 4.2, but they just rattled the windows and broke a few dishes." She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling and considered the shifted tiles above their head. "This did some structural damage. It had to be at least a five."

He regarded her for a long moment, his murky green eyes dark and considering. "It felt more like a 9.8 to me."

She snorted with derision. "Not a chance. If that had been anywhere near a nine, you and I wouldn't be here to talk about it. This whole building would have come down on top of us."

He shook his head and his hand came up to cup her cheek again, his thumb brushing lightly across her lips.

"I wasn't talking about the earthquake."

He saw the confusion in her eyes and smiled faintly. "I was talking about you."

"Oh," she said softly, her breath was a warm puff against the pad of thumb.

"You are devastation, Sarah Mackenzie," he murmured, "--the once-in-a-lifetime kind."

She smiled at him then, a watery, trembling smile that kicked his tired heart into over drive. "--Yeah? Well… you do some pretty serious damage yourself, Clayton Webb."

Closing his eyes, he dropped his head to hers. Maybe, he thought, just maybe, he was going to make it after all.

Sarah lay there for a long moment, feeling his heart racing against her own with a beat that she suspected had little to do with adrenaline. She was afraid to move, afraid to speak, afraid of ruining whatever this fragile connection was that seemed to have blossomed between them. He must have felt it too, for he closed his eyes and edged closer to her, pressing his forehead tightly against hers.

She felt the brush of his nose against her cheek as he inhaled deeply, taking in her scent and felt the faint tremor ripple through him as he slowly exhaled. If she had any doubts left about him, they vanished in that instant. She saw now that she alone had the power to level him. She always had. That, she realized, was why he was really here. He wasn't just doing this for Penny, and he hadn't simply been trying to make peace with the past. He still needed her, maybe just as much as she still needed him.

She raised her hand to his cheek, caressing it gently before threading her fingers into his hair.

"All right," she said softly. "I'll do it."

"What?" His eyes flew open and he pulled back a little, his body instantly growing tense and still.

"I said, I'll do it," she repeated, stroking her fingers through his hair. "I'll go to Switzerland… if you'll take me."

"Thank God." The words were expelled on a harsh, rasping breath and she reached for him, pulling his head down to her thin shoulder as his arms came around her, holding fiercely to him.

"We're going to beat this, you know. Failure is not an option" His words were muffled against the rumpled fabric of her hospital gown, and she felt the tears coming with the smile as she tilted her head and pressed her lips against the cut at his temple.

"I know," she answered.

People were slowly recovering from their shock and the hallways were now filled the pound of rushing footsteps as doctors and nurses hurried to assess and reassure their patients. A shadow suddenly filled the room, blocking out the harsh rays of the emergency lighting and she looked up to see Penny silhouetted in the doorway.  
"Mom! Dad!" Pen's voice was breathless with adrenaline and panic, and it had its effect upon Clay, who pulled his head up from its resting place upon her shoulder.

His eyes locked with hers and in that silent murky gaze she felt the shards of recognition fall into place. She knew look, they'd shared it before: she'd seen it in a hot dusty prison camp in the Darya Bulkh Valley, in the dark, filthy chamber of Sadik Fahd's lair, and on that night when he'd first told her he loved her. It was trust, pure and simple, a complete and total merging of minds. It was, in a word, unity.

How could they have been so foolish as to waste it?

Penny stepped further into the room, moving carefully as the broken glass crunched beneath her feet. "Oh my God! Are you guys ok?"

Sarah looked at Clay, saw the odd, lopsided expression upon his face and realized he was smiling at her. She smiled back.

"Not yet," she said softly, "but we will be."


End file.
